Hello, I’m back. I finished the last edits to Pangkantong Gabay sa Pagiging Ganap, a Tagalog novel set in the end-of-the-world hysteria of 1999, and shipped it out to someone who will at some point decide whether they want to edit my work or not. Then comes pitching/querying, yadda yadda. Tradpub or indie, marketing, yadda.
I just had a tooth extracted this Monday, also the start of Days of Blood and Madness (PMS week), so I’m not feeling all that great. But I want to celebrate in some way, because that book was more than a decade in the making. Part of that is this, a review of what came before and why I write what I write.
First Date with Wonder (5)
Or, An Iinkling about Story Before I Ever Learned to Read.
I am five years old. I am quiet and observant by necessity, because I don’t know how to listen yet. Nobody explains jack shit to me so I mimic, absorb, and form my own reasons about why people do what they do.
It is dark in the theater and me and the family take seats somewhere in the center of the premiere section. It is a giant world with a sticky floor and everyone sits on chairs that have to be weighed down, so I, all forty pounds of me, try to do the same.
In front of us, on a screen, someone in all-black skitters around a man and then hits him. Someone whispers, ninja.
Different boys talk in their living rooms, fight with their parents, sleep in tents, exercise and train with an older man. Later, I see a giant in a short, beige tunic. I hear a song that touches every inch of this tiny me: Rock Me, Amadeus. Strange powers flow through folding fans and hands held in a triangle near hearts. A character named Kenneth* unsettles me.
I don’t have words for what I sense, but it is something that grows bright when I remember a ninja boy’s face, when I worry when someone is after his friends, when I gasp as a man calls on them to put their training to use so urgently, when I shiver as they fight and almost lose, when I sigh when against all odds, they overcome. I can almost taste it, this beginning-middle-end, the wholeness of this documentary, the unfolding of their lives in such a way that in the end I feel we can be friends.
The room goes dark and it is time to go, but while my feet are moving my mind is frozen in that end-of-movies moment, gaping, shaking, thrilled, both hopeful that my future life can maybe make as much sense as theirs did, and early on already a little bit sad that I will probably never be part of their ninja group.
Homebound Hardbounds (7-10)
Or, Reading All the Things.
There is no stopping the discovery train, charging recklessly against a universe of unknowns. I skim words now. I am a fairly regular seven- or eight-year-old. Except maybe for how I attack the volumes of encyclopedia we have at home. Here come the answers that nobody talks to me about. Never mind the whys of life, that comes later, first give me all the whats.
I am insatiable. I sit at the hallway that never gets sun, against the rattan bookshelf cabinet lit only by a dimmable wall lamp, enter a trance while running my fingers along the spines of books, and pick one I have not read recently or memorized yet.
Disney’s Wonderful World of Knowledge holds me first, this glorious carnival of characters and stories from myths and fairy tales and outer space and animals and underground wonders. Every book a door to new nations, new thoughts, new realities.
Then I learn about spelunking, a word I will never get to use again outside of quiz shows and random intellectual flexing. Another book, black holes. Another book, gem stones. Another book, Greek mythology.
I look and point and draw and scribble and master random topics no first or second-grader would ever have use for. My underdeveloped brain throbs in its endless quest for the next new thing, the next strange thing, unsure what it is looking for, but always on about finding it.
As I sponge up facts about the different kinds of mushrooms from a Colliers Encyclopedia: the boring brown porcinis, the reverse-umbrella funnel caps, the sad-sacked morels, I recognize one of them from Super Mario Bros. Red cap with white spores. The thing everybody draws when asked to draw a mushroom.
And yet.
And yet in this large book of secrets, they call this very mushroom the fly amanita–the least edible, most poisonous, of all mushrooms known to man.** The knowledge breaks the already mysterious world open further for me.
Because it means not everybody knows everything.
How can this be? How can people not know? What else do people not know?
Tentative Goth Side-Tracked by Blonds (11-14)
Or, the World Still Won’t Explain Itself.
Readers’ Digest Strange Stories, Amazing Facts: Stories That are Bizarre, Unusual, Odd, Astonishing, and Often Incredible … But True is the actual name of the mystery bible that regularly transports me to European villages and Nordic forests and English countrysides.
I push and push hard against the walls of everyday knowledge, eager to find proof of a precious new reveal: Nobody knows anything.
I gravitate toward darker books, Bellairs‘ evil robots and warlock tombs, ancient evils and curses and binding trauma. The non-alien storylines in The X-Files. Easter Island. Mary Celeste‘s missing passengers. Spring-Heeled Jack. Tamam Shud.
I love the ominous, silent uncertainty that comes before a terrifying discovery: the missing son was imprisoned in the basement all along! His mother was feeding him human organs from her unwitting guests at the old inn! The heart is in the suitcase! Shock! Gore! I lap it up.
Puberty hijacks the goth in-the-making. I am starter strange but still need to to function as a regular teenager who knows about teenager things, so I inevitably get curious about the books my classmates lend each other. Blond girls on the cover. Small romance pocket books with white people on the cover. Suburban interiors and high school cliques. I dabble and oblige.
I read and re-read a Wakefield twin’s first kiss about seventry-three times.
But soon enough, darkness slithers back as Christopher Pike. I am back to gore and horror after a few years. In my head, I am a Christopher Pike book character, I do not flinch at unexplained dimension-jumping. I can and will casually return from the dead. I can name the murderer in our midst, all while being pretty, snarky, and sophisticated, navigating the world better than the adults in my life.
I continue to read everything and anything I get my hands on, like that universe-eating hole in Donut County or, more accurately, the Katamari Damacy, where a prince restores a broken universe by rolling an adhesive ball to capture anything from tiny toys to cows to mountains until it gains enough mass to become a star.
Yet my star, however large and all-encompassing, is missing something.
Holes in the SS Macky (12-16)
Or, Early Sources of Writer’s Block.
Let me tell you about a friend I never had.
The stranger appears unceremoniously in our library of hardbound encyclopedias. No origin story, no meaningful handover. They come dressed in Pinoy Komiks garb, inserted haphazardly in the middle of real books, or randomly squeezed in the space on top of them. The stranger stands no chance.
They look subpar, cheap, standing next to glossy-paged treasuries of English-language stories. Flimsy, magazine paper, inconsistent printing.
I forget about the stranger, but I remember laughing at the jokes.
Later, in school, teachers assign the stranger as required reading. Here the stranger comes decked in a stuffy, academic-looking version of Pinoy Komiks. No pictures, same ugly print. But now, at least, paperback. Cover says Florante at Laura in front.
I am interested in the stranger, for a little bit.
Except the stranger seems to be fooling themself, because. Shit. Why the hell is this Filipino story set in Albania?
Weirded out and unconvinced, I forget about the stranger again.
The stranger pokes its head another time: Ibong Adarna. Set. In. the Kingdom of. Berbanya. I struggle to relate to any single character. Maybe the bird, because the bird sings so beautifully it lulls you to sleep JUST SO IT CAN SHIT ON YOU AND TURN YOU INTO STONE. An anarchist of the highest order. Yet mad respect only takes me so far.
The stranger reappears after several months, this time as Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo, but I was burned twice and so I don’t trust assigned reading to be fun again. Plus, here the stranger peacocks wrapped in another nation’s clothes again. This time, Spanish titles. The books are critical of Spain, sure, but why keep titles in Spanish if you’ve already translated the entire thing? I am fifteen, obviously the smartest girl in the world.
I do get a kick out of creating a scripted dialogue I make up based on a Simon and Ibarra confrontation scene and scheming with playwrights and theater people to write and stage the supposed third novel, the Makamisa, because why the hell not (it doesn’t pan out, but kudos to us for ambition). But those interests are in other lanes.
The stranger is, as you might have guessed, Filipino literature.
Why Make Friends (13-16)
Or, An Eat-the-Strawberry Situation.
I’ve begun to write, as wide fiction readers often do. Stories from a subconscious full of Western media. I don’t know it yet, but I feel it the same way I gained a sense of story before learning its mechanics, but this time, a knowing that I wear a costume when I write.
Through some vague wordplay in the halls of St. Scholastica’s Academy of Marikina, I manage to promise to a kabarkada that I will trade stories with her. An exciting proposition, as up until that point nobody bothered to ask whether I wrote stories or whether I wanted them read.
I buy those cheap Record books from National. I tear up pages to write on them and staple them up into tentative chapters.
The story I go in to trade is about a group of Caucasian teenagers in a house with no parents, in a fictionalized town in a fictional country, speaking English for some reason, watching television, drinking alcohol, until the lights go out and a dead body is found and now they have to find out what happened.
Apart from the fact that this is basically the first few chapters of Christopher Pike’s Final Friends, a part of me sees the problem here. My story is a question, and the question is, why do I hate myself?
The longer version of that question is: I understand fiction is also entertainment, so nothing’s stopping me from writing an American character if I want to. But why do I feel like I have to?
A future me, writing this blog entry now, intrudes in my own narrative, tells me, that until I can stand face to face with my self-hate, a self-hate informed and formed by all the books I’ve read where I did the important but thankless work of seamlessly creeping into the skins of white people so often it became second nature in order to get to that feeling place where we’re all the same, I will never understand why I write what I write.
I am confused by how meta this is, especially since it will take another ten years before I understand what meta means. But also, I think, does this mean I should stop writing until I can write in Filipino about Filipinos? Kelan pa ‘yon?
Then I get Anna’s story.
Anna*** flips the script (intentionally or not, I’ll never know) on the thing I’ve been trying to navigate weakly and owns it: in her story, she makes up an entire universe, an entire race of beings, and an entire language (translated in English for my benefit) in a story brimming with sexual tension between its two leads. It also somehow manages to teach me what the word “loathe” means, and how knowing that becomes a turning point in a character’s admission of love.
It blows my fucking mind.
Suddenly I have the license to throw everything I ever knew about stories away. If I’m not ready to write about home, if I’m torn because I can’t find my voice in a well-intentioned stranger, if it’s so hard to find the fiction in my real, everyday life, then at least I can write about something completely different, where I make the rules, where I don’t have to inherit someone else’s school lockers and idioms and holidays.
PWEDE PALA ‘YON?!?!
And that’s the story of why I write speculative fiction. The end.
I[f you’re so patriotic, why are you writing in English, Macky? *finger guns* Yep, wait for the blog entry explaining that choice.]
* It was Dennis da Silva, who is now serving a life sentence for pedophilia (oh I mean rape, because he raped and sexually abused the 14-year-old kid of his live-in partner and 12 is the age of consent in the Philippines because we are a perfectly rational, child-friendly society /sarc).
** Disputed since then, and was in fact a colonialism on the part of field guide developers (quota na’ko). Don’t believe me? Read “A Study of Cultural Bias in Field Guide Determinations of Mushroom Edibility Using the Iconic Mushroom, Amanita muscaria, as an Example” http://davidarora.com/uploads/rubel_arora_muscaria_revised.pdf
*** Whose birthday was last August 16, go donate to animal rescue and shelters, deets on her page.
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