Immigrants To The United States

"The work involved in writing a novel is completely solitary, unlike playwriting. And the struggle is often painful. There is no one to turn to but yourself. You confront your own demons in order to dig deep and come up with something risky and powerful. Playwriting is the exact opposite process for me because it's so collaborative. If you're blessed with a terrific cast, a visionary director, an innovative sound and design team, then your play has a ninety-nine percent chance of being realized in the best possible way. I think people forget -- even some of my most aware graduate students! -- that writing is hard work. Period."

"you can never see any of your characters as monsters; I think then you'd write a really terrible book. Everyone is a complicated and flawed human being (Callaloo, Fall 2008)"

"(Is it important for Filipinx/Filpinx American storytellers to focus on Philippine culture and history in their work?) No. You should feel free to write whatever you want to write. We don’t make art to represent. That has to happen organically. Filipinos are not a monolith. Humans aren’t a monolith. We all have different experiences and need to write across the different identities we hold. As artists, we should be free to write about a wide range of complicated characters and subjects. Don’t limit yourself to only what you know. But definitely do your homework! Being a writer is hard work. (2022)"

"Defiant, naive, and passionate, we are sprouting up all over the Bay Area-artists of color who write, perform, and collaborate with each other, borders be damned. We are muralistas, filmmakers, musicians, dancers, painters, printmakers, small press publishers, playwrights, poets, and more poets. . . . San Francisco seems to be more a city of poets and musicians than anything else. Rock 'n' roll, R&B, the funk mystique of Oakland, the abstract seduction of jazz, and the glorious rants and chants of loup garous, gypsies, sympathetic cowboys, and water buffalo shamans: Al Robles, Ishmael Reed, Norman Jayo, Ntozake Shange, Victor Hernandez Cruz, Janice Mirikitani, Thulani Davis, David Henderson, Alejandro Murguia, Ed Dom, Alta, Serafin and Lou Syquia, Kitty Tsui, and on and on.... They are my teachers and peers, kindred spirits, borders be damned. A movement is afoot to assert ourselves as artists and thinkers, to celebrate our individual histories, our rich and complicated ethnicities."

"It will never end, I hope-whatever "it" is. The gift, the quest, the visions, the dreams in secret languages. The songs and the storytelling. It will never end; it is still writing itself."

"(KASJ: Could you have written this book in any other place? The whole thing is about the Philippines.) JH: Maybe the question is really: Why does a certain place have a pull on a writer? People probably do wonder that about me. I've lived in the US for over 30 years. Why do I keep writing stories that are largely set in the Philippines? C'mon! The culture is just so rich and has so much happening in it. To me it's a treasure trove. Lush, stark, abundant, untainted, polluted. The whole world has gone through there: Arabs, Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Brits, Americans. The Philippines has everything. The supernatural, the superreal, and the surreal. It's about grim reality, too. It's about faith in a larger being, a deep, ingrained spiritual faith. It's about strength and courage, but also about corruption, humor and generosity. I mean, God! You almost don't have to make anything up...Everything there is rife with, you know, dramatic conflict, tension, and romance. It's an extravagant culture bursting with extravagant emotions. It also is the place where I grew up, so it will always have real and lasting meaning for me. (The Women's Review of Books, March 2004)"

"We all need money to live and continue to make our art. And sometimes these prizes and awards can be a sort of validation. But money and prizes don’t mean that the work you produce is going to be any good. Sometimes those accolades actually get in the way. The lean times are often when the good stuff happens. So, let’s not get fixated on fame and money. Write like you’re on fire, be fearless, dream and explore. (2022)"

"For other people perhaps it was something else that brought them to certain conclusions about their lives and their identities. But, for me, film was truly one of the more powerful sources of entertainment, enlightenment, disillusionment. So, I use it a lot. In the writing of Dogeaters, especially, the movies were there because they were absolutely part of the fabric of my memory. Once I found that key, all the doors started swinging open in my imagination."

"What made me want to write a novel was reading One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Garcia Marquez. I was turned on to that by a friend from Mexico who gave me the book. It was like Holy Communion or something. I said, "Yes!" Here is a novel that reads so lyrically and so poetically, and yet is a novel. It's a wonderful story. You want to know what happens to these people. And at the same time I saw the connection for me. It was like the Philippines was something I was carrying around and I didn't know what art form it would take to convey the story I wanted to tell, and I read that book and said, "That's it. One day I'm gonna do it.""

"If I were to write with that agenda in mind, then I'd destroy the writing. No, I write really because I have to and if the writing also destroys some of those myths and subverts forms and makes people question the very idea of the writer, the woman, the Filipino American, the whatever, great! (INTERVIEWER: Where does art have to come from to accomplish those kinds of ends? If you set out directly to accomplish them, you probably wouldn't have writing that is, in your opinion, worth reading? So, where does it have to come from?) JH: It has to come from the deepest, deepest, deepest insides of your soul. And it's got to be brutally honest. It's like pornography. You know it when you are doing it and you know when you're bullshitting. You know when you're being self-conscious and contrived and forcing something to be there because you want to make sure that people get the point. You know when that's happening. But if you just really listen to yourself and to your characters, you don't go for the easy stuff."

"A lot of novels about the Philippines or set in the Philippines don't cut it at all because they don't capture the crazy quilt atmosphere and the hybrid ambiance that occurs twenty-four hours a day. Things happening all the time, and noise and crowds and beautiful animals and amazing flora. At the same time, pollution and urbanization and sophistication and, you know, the jungle. How do you do all that? You can't tell it in a traditional way because the language dies. And also the music of the language itself, the music of the streets. How do convey that chaos? So, once I decided to go with it as I found it, I relaxed because at the risk of alienating some readers, this was the way the novel had to be presented."

"I have been definitely influenced more by Latin American writers than by any other type of writer. They are very close in terms of voice their humor, their fatalism, their... well, that overused term "magical realism." It's a wonderful term that's just been used so much we don't know what it means anymore. But the way they can use language and visions and surrealism without being corny, and the humor that's always there, is very close to a Filipino sensibility. More so than-now this is a completely personal perception-other writers from Southeast Asia."

"I always had dreamed of writing a novel set in the Philippines—what I knew of it. I struggled for years while I was writing poetry, thinking, one day I’m going to write this book. But in what voice? I read Malaysian writers and Chinese writers and Indian writers until I stumbled upon the Latin American writers and I realized that that was it: the humor, the fatalism, the passion and irony (1991)"

"if you get too specific the timelessness is lost. (1991)"

"It’s best if you go out in the world knowing more than one language, I don’t care what the language is. It’s good for your brain to dream in another language. It gives you a clue, another perspective, a way of understanding, some compassion for other people—even if it’s just because you know how to joke in another language. (1991)"

"(KASJ: What kinds of real-life events are useful for fiction?) JH: All of it is useful. It's very personal what will move one artist and what will move another. I think you can find [art] in both the smallest thing and in the most horrific catastrophe. It could be something as simple as the mystery of seeing someone enter a room, down to a major historical event like the Tasaday controversy or the Vietnam War. Everything is fodder. (The Women's Review of Books, March 2004)"

"I'm not a writer who works off an outline. I don't do file cards. Some writers know where they're going when they sit down to write a novel. I know there are certain things I want to include, but I'm character driven and if the characters keep moving and living and growing on me, the story unfolds. It's like a puzzle which starts falling into place. But I never know where I'm going when I start."

"I don't write with "lessons" in mind. I just hope my readers are absorbed by the story, that they enjoy the read, and that the novel raises some provocative questions. (The Women's Review of Books, March 2004)"

"When I lost my mother, I thought, there's no point. Everything I have done, I'd done for her. I went to school for her. She gave me no pressure. You know, and it's important for me to say this because, you know, there's a stereotype of the Asian tiger mom. My mother was never such a mother. She said, whatever you want to do, as long as you're happy, you can do it. And worse comes to worst, she points to the desk. She works in a nail salon. She points to the desk beside her. There's always an empty desk in the salon. She says, you can sit down right here, and then we'll work together. So I had ultimate freedom to explore. And I think for me, you know, that freedom really was all to serve her. It was, how do I help my mother get out of the projects? Every immigrant has that dream."

"(The book that…kept me up way too late:) Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. The sheer lyricism of his writing had me incapable of abandoning the story."

"Speaking out cost me my job, my marriage and my happiness at the time, but it also helped save the lives of thousands and thousands of people."

"...you realize that grief is perhaps the last and final translation of love. And I think, you know, this is the last act of loving someone. And you realize that it will never end. You get to do this to translate this last act of love for the rest of your life. And so, you know, it's - really, her absence is felt every day. But because I'm becoming an author again in another book, it's doubly felt. And ever since I lost her, I felt that my life has been lived in only two days, if that makes any sense. You know, there's the today, where she is not here, and then the vast and endless yesterday where she was, even though it's been three years since. How many months and days? But I only see it in - with one demarcation. Two days - today without my mother, and yesterday, when she was alive. That's all I see. That's how I see my life now."

"The novel insists that there is power, and with it, agency, in survival—which includes the interracial tensions you speak of—because trauma is still an integral reality for queer folks. But these bodies do know joy, and they know it by acknowledging and honoring the tribulations they outlived. We often think of survival as something that merely happens to us, that we are perhaps lucky to have. But I like to think of survival as a result of active self-knowledge, and even more so, a creative force."

"The world can misread us, and they will, and they have, and they won’t stop. But we do not have to misread ourselves. We can’t lose sight of what we came here for, which is to write for ourselves or for the people we love. The Western myth tells us to discard our former selves, that we have to constantly improve, move towards perfection. There’s a sort of verticality to Judeo-Christian values. But I think when I am writing I’m going back. I think it’s important for us to go back and say thank you to who we were, to go back and rescue that person and actually invite them into the present. I think writing is a dispersing of selves. When you sit down to write and to do your work, you must gather the phantoms in one place so they can work together."

"Countless families were broken apart and ruined by AIDS, leaving many AIDS orphans. They had no one to turn to."

"This book is as much a coming-of-age story as it is a coming-of-art. I would say that I begin with the voices of those I care for, family or otherwise, and follow them until they drop off, until I have to create them in order to hear them. My writing is an echo. In this way, On Earth is not so much a novel, but the ghost of a novel. That’s the hope anyway."

"We’re talking about a claim to storytelling. We are taught that a valid or useful education is one in medicine, science, bioengineering. That storytelling, or the ‘liberal arts’, are defunct or fading. Yet, in the Fortune 500 companies, in the Googles, the Amazons and the Facebooks, they’re obsessed with storytelling. So you can have technology, but it’s moot if you do not have a story to provoke it. We also see this in political campaigns. They’re all about manipulation of story. I agree with you a hundred per cent, the urgency of the moment now is to create new myths.This is also informed by Buddhism, because Buddhist practice is so interested in lucid dreaming. Monks constantly practice lucid dreaming. If you can be aware that you are dreaming, then you can also be aware that you are being foggy or ignorant in the living stage. This sharpens your ability for discernment, and the capacity to look at the world more clearly. Buddhism is very clear to me because it is this feeling, above all else – above even the object – that matters. So reading is not about the book, it’s about the transition of the thought, orchestrated through language, into the brain. That’s why it’s so real to us. I think that’s very true to how we live: sometimes the feeling is much more than the world can support. That’s why myth-making, like you said, is where we’re going. That’s the future."

"The great male writers of the European tradition, be it Proust, Tolstoy, Turgenev, deemed that those most inspiring to them existed in a white aristocracy…You read those books and you wouldn’t even know that people of colour existed in Europe. To each his own, and that was their choice. But I wanted to say: these lives, of women, and even of poor white people – these lives are worthy of literature. As Turgenev looked at the crumbling Russian empire, I look at these folks in a different crumbling empire and deemed that these are inspiring lives to an artist."

"The incredible thing that I can never quite understand was how they were able to kick them all out. The men had access to jobs, money, a patriarchal presence in the world, and even though they had troubles too, as immigrants and refugees, we come from a patriarchal tradition in the old country just as deeply rooted as in the west. In some cases, when men are talking to each other, women aren’t supposed to even be in the room. So that was what they were coming out of. And to think divorce?! These things were still taboo where they came from. And they all really did it."

"When I really assess Western culture in how it grapples with other bodies and other ecologies of thinking, at the end of the day, my response is: please catch up. And I do mean – please – because we want you to catch up, we want you to be here, because where you’re at is a quicksand that’s killing you."

"The stories, at first, were folklore. My grandmother would tell a ghost story, then she would say: oh, that was after the napalm. So through cycles of these stories, that world started opening and as a child I would ask: what’s napalm? They ploughed on. It was almost intoxicating for them to create a mythology of their lives, because they were so powerless. They were all women. The men were gone; they did their harm and were gone. And they were empty hands, had no English, were powerless everywhere else. But when it was time to tell the story, they held everything."

"I think that might not have been enough, were it not for me being my family ’s only hope. Because they were also dying, in a different way: financially, mentally. And I thought, I can’t die. Literally I can’t die."

"Only "America," of all national designations, took on the combined force of eschatology and chauvinism. Many forms of nationalism have laid claims to a world-redeeming promise; many Christian sects have sought, in open or secret heresy, to find the sacred in the profane; many European Protestants have linked the soul’s journey and the way to wealth. But only the "American Way," of all modern symbologies, has managed to circumvent the contradictions inherent in these approaches. Of all symbols of identity, only "American" has succeeded in uniting nationality with universality, civic and spiritual selfhood, sacred and secular history, the country’s past and the paradise to be, in a single transcendent ideal."

"[T]here seem to be more CRIMINALS in the Trump Administration than in the Caravan."

"Although my Father had long since renounced the copyright in all his works written after 1883, and although, after having made all his real estate over to his children he had as a matter of fact no property left, still he could not but be aware that his life was far from corresponding with his principles, and this consciousness perpetually preyed upon his mind. One has but to read some of his posthumous works attentively to see that the idea of leaving home and radically altering his whole way of life had presented itself to him long since and was a continual temptation to him."

"I was reared a Catholic, but I think every day we ask ourselves, not consciously, what are we doing on this planet? What's it all about."

"There are 4,000 mosques in the city (Istanbul). Some are just stunning, and it really makes me think about becoming a Muslim."

"The chief personage in the house was my Mother. She settled everything. She interviewed Nikolái, the cook, and ordered dinner; she sent us out for walks, made our shirts, was always nursing some baby at the breast; all day long she was bustling about the house with hurried steps. One could be naughty with her, though she was sometimes angry and punished us. She knew more about everything than anybody else. She knew that one must wash every day, that one must eat soup at dinner, that one must talk French, learn not to crawl about on all fours, not to put one's elbows on the table; and if she said that one was not to go out walking because it was just going to rain, she was sure to be right, and one must do as she said. When I coughed she gave me liquorice or King of Denmark drops; so I was very fond of coughing. When my Mother put me to bed and went upstairs to play duets with Father, I found it very hard to go to sleep, and I was annoyed at being left alone; so I started coughing and went on until Nurse went and fetched Mamma, and I was angry with her for coming so slowly. I entirely refused to go to sleep until she had come to my rescue and measured out exactly ten drops in a wineglass and given them to me."

"Anna Karenina was the name of the novel on which my Father and Mother were both at work. My Mother's work seemed much harder than my Father's, because we actually saw her at it, and she worked much longer hours than he did. … Leaning over the manuscript and trying to decipher my Father's scrawl with her short-sighted eyes, she used to spend whole evenings at work, and often sat up late at night after everybody else had gone to bed. Sometimes, when anything was written quite illegibly, she would go to my Father's study and ask him what it meant. … When it happened, my Father used to take the manuscript in his hand, and ask with some annoyance: "What on earth is the difficulty?" and would begin to read it out aloud. When he came to the difficult place he would mumble and hesitate, and sometimes had the greatest difficulty in making out, or rather in guessing, what he had written."

"When he got home my Father at once told us of Alexander II's assassination, and the papers which arrived the next day confirmed the news. I remember the overwhelming impression which this senseless murder produced on my Father. Besides his horror at the cruel death of the Tsar, "who has done so much good to people and always wished them so much good, this good old man," he could not help thinking of the murderers, of the approaching executions, and "not so much about them as about those who were preparing to take part in their murder, and especially about Alexander III.""

"The first member of the family who allied herself with my Father at that time was my sister Masha… In 1885 she was fifteen years old. She was a thin, fair girl, lissom and rather tall, resembling my Mother in figure, but taking more after my Father in features, with the same strongly marked cheekbones and with bright blue eyes. Quiet and retiring in disposition, she always had a certain air of being, as it were, rather "put upon." She felt for my Father's solitude, and was the first of the whole family to draw away from the society of those of her own age, and unobtrusively, but firmly and definitely, to go over to my Father's side. Always a champion of the downtrodden and unfortunate, Masha threw herself whole-heartedly into the interests of the poor of the village and, whenever she could, helped them with such little physical strength as she had, and, above all, with her great responsive heart."

"My Father hardly ever made us do anything; but it always somehow came about that of our own initiative we did exactly what he wanted us to. My Mother often scolded us and punished us; but when my Father wanted to make us do anything he merely looked us hard in the eyes, and we understood: that look was far more effective than any command. … My Father's great power as an educator lay in this, that it was as impossible to conceal anything from him as it was from one's own conscience. He knew everything, and to deceive him was just like deceiving oneself: it was nearly impossible, and quite useless."

"Maybe in June or July, I looked in the mirror. I’m like, ‘Man, I see a fat man. Look at that man, I feel fat.’ Not just feel fat, just look fat, too. I needed like a bra or something. I kept eating all this Turkish food. I was like, I need to stop doing it. I need to just — the season is coming. It’s a really important season for us. I need to be in shape."

"This season I've been on more of a plant-based diet, getting away from all the animals and all that. I had to get away from that. So my energy is up, my body feels amazing. Just understanding what the diet is like for me and what’s beneficial for me for having the highest energy out here and being able to sustain it at a very high level."

"There is much to weep about. But it is a sin to permit our tears to drown out our song of gratitude and joy in the gift of creation."

"It’s a perfect killing machine...A handgun [wound] is simply a stabbing with a bullet. It goes in like a nail...[With the high-velocity rounds of the AR-15 style rifle] it's as if you shot somebody with a Coke can."

"She has a 101 percent chance of surviving. She will not die. She does not have that permission from me."

"One looks like a grenade went off in there. The other looks like a bad knife cut."

"This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang, but with an anime avatar calling you a cuck"

"America is not doing so hot right now I was hypnotized by the travel ban, the way, you know, a chicken gets hypnotized by something it's afraid of I'm a very privileged person. And I am, like, completely documented. Everything's in order, and I'm educated. I speak English. I don't have that much to be afraid of. But whenever I run into one of these — and I'm not going to again, and that's amazing — whenever I ran into those issues, my heart would start pounding. I just felt really stressed out about it every time."