A few days before leaving Manila last May, I was browsing through the Philippine section of Powerbooks on Pasay Road in Makati when I came across Lakambini Sitoy’s collection of short stories “Mens Rea and Other Stories” (Anvil, 169 pages, 195 pesos). As the opinion editor of the Manila Times, and a weekly columnist in that same paper, I was familiar with her name and her columns, but had never read any of her fiction.
As I picked up the slim volume, I noticed a white and gold sticker on the cover that said the book had been awarded a National Book Award by the Manila Critics Circle. It was as if it had been awarded the Good Housekeeping seal of the book world. After buying the book, I carried it with me to the US and back here to Jeddah. It wasn’t until a few days ago that I was able to sit down and read it.
The stories are good, if a little same-ish, usually revolving around a young feminist woman who works at a women’s non-governmental organization to make some extra money on the side. This can perhaps be explained by the fact that Sitoy was working at the Women’s Legal Bureau when she wrote these stories, after postponing plans to study law. I’m not saying that Sitoy put herself in each of the short stories in this book, but inevitably where she was at that time in her life is reflected in her stories.
The main character of the title story, Mens Rea, is Steve, a bright law student who applies for a part-time job at a women’s NGO and gets it. His best friend Helen, applies for the same job, but isn’t hired. Working in an all-female environment, Steve isn’t allowed to counsel battered women on the group’s helpline. Instead, he is asked to change light bulbs, deal with computer viruses and deliver documents all across town. Needless to say, all does not end well for Steve or his relationship with Helen, who ends up dumping him after exploding one day and screaming at him that she cannot stand him sucking up all of her free time.
Although most of Sitoy’s characters are strong-willed women, they all seem to have a fetish for the designer clothes and scents of Makati yuppies. “But I love these men. I love the way they smell. A clean, .....crisp-linen type of fragrance, a bouquet of imported cologne.....I love their white or gray shirts with the thin blue stripes, the occasional pinks as pale as secret skin,” rhapsodizes the female narrator in “I See My Shadow on the Pavement”.
Sitoy is good when setting the scene of each character’s psychological state and inner thoughts. What she needs to work on is developing characters that don’t seem like carbon copies of herself.
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THE AMERICAN writer Paul Theroux is, I think, also guilty of mining his own experiences when writing his new novel “Hotel Honolulu” (Hamish Hamilton, 440 pages, S$30.75). The main character of this book has so many similarities to Theroux himself , that I couldn’t help chuckling to myself while reading it. Like Theroux, the narrator is a novel writer who abandons his wife and children in London, moving to Hawaii where he takes up a new life and a new wife. Like Theroux, the narrator mentions having lived in Africa in his youth.
In “Hotel Honolulu” the narrator arrives in Hawaii, meets Buddy Hamstra, the owner of Hotel Honolulu, and is hired to be its manager. The novel is the telling of Buddy’s and the narrator’s life as they revolve around the third-rate hotel.
One interesting sub-theme in this book is Buddy’s search for a new wife. He ends up flying to Manila and marrying a Filipina called Pinky. Unfortunately, Theroux paints her as a gold-digging ex-prostitute, risen from the slums of Cebu City, and cashing-in in the United States. Although Buddy makes fun of himself by calling himself “Your Meal Ticket” to Pinky, he also keeps referring to Pinky having eaten dogs in the slums as a poor child. It is a well-known fact that some poorer Filipinos do occasionally eat dog meat, but Theroux overuses this in his novel. He should have known better than to use such a tired, old cliché.
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ANOTHER book I am currently reading is Michael Ondaatje’s “Anil’s Ghost” (Vintage International, 311 pages, $7.99). It tells the story of Anil Tissera, a young forensic anthropologist, who returns to her homeland of Sri Lanka to investigate political murders for a human rights group.
Of course, Sri Lanka has been at war with itself since the 1980s, with the minority Tamil population fighting for increased rights and recognition from the majority Sinhalese. As in most civil wars, the atrocities on both sides are never-ending, and since everyone looks the same it’s hard to tell who’s the enemy and who’s not.
It’s clear from the novel itself, and from the lengthy acknowledgements at the back of the book, that Ondaatje has done his homework on the civil war, the wounds it produces and on the history of ancient buildings in the country.
If only a Filipino writer could write a similar novel about the conflict in Mindanao between Muslims and non-Muslims, I’m sure such a novel would do much to explain the situation there to a whole new generation of Pinoys.
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FINALLY, the only book I did buy while in America was Margaret Cho’s hilarious autobiography “I’m The One That I Want” (Ballantine Books, 213 pages, $22.95).
Born in San Francisco to a family of Korean immigrants, Cho dropped out of high school to hit the road as a stand-up comedian. She eventually hit it big, hired by ABC Television to star in the sitcom “All-American Girl”, the first TV show to ever showcase an Asian American family.
But the road to stardom wasn’t easy. Apart from dealing with nasty Korean-American kids in summer camp as a child, who were unbelievably cruel to her for being fat, Cho also had to deal with her addiction to diet pills and excessive drinking. She writes movingly of touring America with her one-woman comedy show, and describes accurately the loneliness and nasty motel rooms she has to deal with while trying to make a living as a comedian. I first saw Cho on television a few years ago and found her extremely funny. She is one of the few Asian American voices who seem to have crossed over into mainstream America. She deserves to be discovered by all.