 Good evening, so my name is Christina Juan and I'm very happy to welcome you to SOA. This is a great turnout. We're very happy to have you all here. The evening activities will be very casual. It's not going to be very formal or anything, but it's really a chance to gather creative writers and sort of their enablers for an evening of books and conversations about writing as Southeast Asians in the UK. So tonight also is a chance for me to introduce a new initiative here at SOAS, which is called SULAT, or SULAT. So SULAT at SOAS is a creative writing space that is committed to discovering and supporting writers of Southeast Asian descent in the UK. So right now we are starting to accept applicants for fellowships for creative writing fellows for the fall of 2018. That table over there is some flyers for you if you're interested, some requirements and different things. So we can deal with that later. Without much ado, let me begin the night by introducing Elaine Castillo and her wonderful debut novel, America is Not the Heart. So Elaine is a Filipino-American and born in the San Francisco Bay Area. She graduated with a BA in comparative literature at UC Berkeley and moved to the UK in the 2000s. And to do an MA in creative writing at Goldsmiths. That was very helpful. It was also in the UK that she wrote and finished the novel that we are celebrating today. So let me begin the night with her reading of an excerpt from the book and then we'll open up for questions. Thank you, Christina, for that amazing introduction and thank you all for coming out tonight. My God, what a turnout and you guys all look gorgeous. This is very weird. I want to be taking photos of all of you. But thank you for coming out. As Christina said, I lived in England for about eight and a half years and came here in 2009 and have since moved back to the Bay Area permanently. It's quite surreal in a way to be back in the city that I spent sort of a better part of a decade in and what was once home so I think it's always going to have a special place in my heart. It's a real pleasure and a privilege to be here with all of you too. Celebrate, I suppose, the launch of this book which was, yes, written and finished here. So I'm going to read just, I think I'm going to read something basically as short as possible so that we can all get to just sort of talking casually and chatting with each other and then all get back to our drinks which is really what we want to do. So I think all you need to know about this sort of short paragraph, our short passage is that it's just told from the perspective of our main character whose name is Heronima de Vera. She's also nicknamed hero by her younger cousin. She's a former communist rebel, a former MPA rebel. So the New People's Army is the armed wing of the Communist Party of the Philippines. She is part of the MPA for around a decade and is eventually captured and kept in a prison camp for two years and upon her release, shortly, a couple of years after her release, eventually lives in exile in California with her uncle in the Bay Area in a town that's, the town that is essentially the town that I grew up in, in the kind of 90s sort of Filipino suburbs of the Bay Area. So that's all you need to know for now. Another character mentioned, her name is Teresa Teresa is Hero's Superior in the NPA. I want no prisoners, Teresa said to the cadres, quoting General Jacob Smith, who presided over the genocides in Samar. I want you to kill and burn. The more you kill and burn, the better you will please me. Smith, nicknamed Hellroaring, introduced a system called Reconcentration, segregating the common population from so-called revolutionaries by containing the former in what was called a Reconcentrated Zone. The point was to sever the guerrilla fighters from the rest of the civilian population that, as I explained, depriving them of access to food, shelter, sympathy. The Reconcentrated Zone was placed under strict military surveillance and everything outside of the zone was treated as a no-man's land. Anyone unlucky enough to be outside of its perimeter, maybe a parent or ex-lover was a revolutionary, maybe a sick relative lived on the other side, was shot on site. Their bodies were left next to the homes that had already been raised, cattle that had been massacred, crops that had been left to decay. Let no livelihood be salvaged from the earth. That was the official policy. Smith's fellow general, J. Franklin Bell, carried out a similar campaign in Batangas. According to his own calculations, over 600,000 Filipinos were killed within three years. Hero didn't know of any official Filipino calculations. Another word for what the Americans were doing, coined by a Republican congressman, was pacification. Bell bragged that he'd found the secret of pacification. They never rebelled in the zone, because there isn't anybody there to rebel. President McKinley was more succinct. He called it extermination. Hero didn't learn any of those words at school. What she did remember from her time in school was a painting by El Greco, the Greek Spaniard who produced portraits of saints and messiahs and royals. The teachers in Hero's Catholic school mostly practiced the kind of two-face Badre Damaso-style authoritarianism that had passed for pedagogy in the archipelago for over 300 years, abstinious piety with a touch of fondling, but they would occasionally extend their lessons to art when the artwork subject was religion. El Greco's work passed educational muster in vegan, and so when Hero was around 10 years old, she saw the first and only painting she ever loved. Her teacher saw the class a portrait of Jesus that Hero hadn't ever seen before, nothing like the blandly virile one her father Hammond hung next to the more traditional pastorals, and it drew Jesus' dewy and muscular like a Hollywood idol. The El Greco had been painting around the time Magalet was organizing his revolt in Cagallan. That wasn't how the teacher framed it, but years later, Hero drew the two things together, looking for a familiar face in the foreign frame. In the painting, Jesus was raising two long, anemic fingers in greeting or postponement, and he had strabismus, a quality Heria used to spout about as a feature shared by mystics, geniuses, themes, imaginative children, and those possessed by Capres. One, I looked the world in the face, the other, I needed a break and wandered off. The teacher said the name of the painting was El Salvador del Mundo, El Salvador del Mundo, but in no painting had Hero ever seen anyone look less like a savior of the world. The expression of Jesus in the painting was one of grievous humility and reticence. His face was hollow-cheeked and wan, and in his gaze was the inconsolable calm of someone who had long ago reconciled himself to the knowledge that the world was totally unzealable. For years, Hero thought the title was meant to be ironic, but only in California did Hero remember the painting again and finally realize what she hadn't been able to know back then, what the face in the El Greco painting actually looked like. It just looked like an adult, someone who'd once been a kid and wasn't one anymore. Thank you. Thank you. So let's begin with a sort of, so feel free to ask questions, those who have read the book, the proof of the book, but I'll start with a few questions, and then, yeah. So let's begin with a title of the book. If you're Filipino, you're probably familiar with America, it's the Bulusan book that I think every single Filipino American has probably read, maybe, in the States, not so much here, I guess. But can you tell us how you chose the title and then... I think originally, originally it wasn't the kind of grand intertextual ambition that I think it probably now, in a way, performs at, ultimately, I think, not to traffic and cultural stereotypes, but being Filipino, I like a pun. So basically, whenever I would hear someone say the title America is in the Heart, Bulusan's title, I always sort of heard it as America isn't the Heart. So for me, it was always just a kind of joke that I used to say to myself, America isn't the Heart. So I think because that was a little private joke, I thought to myself, okay, one day that'll be the title of something. And of course, that's why the last chapter is America isn't the Heart with the Conjunction. So ultimately, it really just came out of a kind of private joke. But of course, as Christina said, the Bulusan is a kind of foundational text of Filipino-American history, of kind of ethnic studies in college and high school pedagogy. I think it should be required reading for American history, for all students. For people who don't know it, the America is in the Heart with those sort of experiences of largely Filipino but also Mexican migrant laborers on the west coast of the United States in the 30s and 40s, and really sort of catalogs the kinds of extremes of poverty and exploitation and discrimination and state violence and white supremacy and police brutality that they experience, that is all sort of catalogued and ultimately dystopic, sort of relentless in prose. It also features, in a way that I think is often less talked about, a kind of apocalyptic sense of misogyny in that the book is also rife with femicides, abuse of women, female rape, in ways that I think are problematic in the book. I don't know that Bulusan's narrator. I think there are problems with the ways in which women are represented in the book in ways female interiority is represented in the book and how Bulusan's narrator contends with the kind of violence against women that he sees around him. But ultimately, it's still, I think, especially as Filipino-American writers, we're all kind of daughters or kids of that book. If you're a kid of that book, you also have the right to tussle with your parents. But it's still a book that's very important to me. Also because it was the first book that I ever read that had narrators, the narrator, people who are from Pungasinan because that's where my mom's family is from and who grew up with the kind of abject rural poverty that my mom came out of in Pungasinan. Because at that point, I'd read a lot of Filipino-American and Filipino literature, but it was largely about kind of well-themed Manilaños, sort of urban, sort of educated. And for me, it was the first time that I ever saw rural, Philippine rural poverty that sounded like the stories my mom and grandmother used to talk about. A very sort of unapologetic way in terms of your heritage. So like if you've read the book, you'll see that a lot of it is in Tagalog, for example, or in the native language, and you don't seem to take too much effort to translate them or maybe like write for a Western audience. Is this deliberate or is this something that you think is sort of a way forward for Southeast Asian writers? I definitely think it's a combination of being absolutely deliberate and then also absolutely natural. The town that I grew up in in California, Mopedas, which is also the town where most of the book, a lot of the book takes place, has been as long as I can remember for many years, a majority-minority town. I was a largely Filipino, Vietnamese, Mexican, sort of Taiwanese community. I think something like 60% of the inhabitants speak a language other than English and I personally, you know, my mom spoke Pungasinan, my dad spoke Ilocano, they spoke Tagalog or Filipino to each other and of course there was English for me and I spoke in a way, aside from Ilocano because my father's family didn't really live near us, I spoke a kind of combination or heard a kind of combination of all those languages pretty sort of intuitively. Pungasinan was my first language but there was always kind of, the borders between these languages were always extremely porous and nobody in my family was sort of translating things like that was just the kind of banal reality that, you know, you would start a sentence in maybe Tagalog but there would be a Pungasinan word in it but then I would respond and maybe Pungasinan in English and that was just how language operated in my home and it was how language operated in a lot of homes in my town and so for me that's just a picture of an American reality and the fact that it's not an American reality that we see depicted as, you know, sort of emblematically Californian that really has to do more with our kind of mainstream ideas of what gets to be considered Californian or what gets to be considered American and so for me, you know, writing in a way trying to be faithful to the kinds of the kind of material sort of linguistic landscape that, you know, I know very well means not translating words it means also not assuming that there's the primacy of a reader is apparently is going to be some like non-Filipino speaking or ultimately the dog whistle word here is really hiding, assuming to be a white reader and I'm just simply not writing for the kind of primacy or comfort of a white reader. I'm not interested in making my fiction or my sort of writing process palatable in that way or deforming it in that way for the comfort at the cost of then writing fiction that is not commensurate to the realities that I come out of and I think that impulse, that compulsion that, you know, Southeast Asian writers or any writers who are writing in multiple languages or coming out of multiple sort of language threads are made to feel that they have to flatten those realities is really ultimately toxic to literature and it's an insult to, you know, the idea that any of us think about literature which is, you know, a republic it's a place where you... it can be commensurate to the kind of realities that we, you know, just that we live in our lives and our voices and our families sorry, I think I got a question over here Yeah, yeah it's telling that both of those writers are also men I mean, I do think, I think that... thank you for that question, I think that's a really good point and a kind of, in a way, a good sort of way to think about how we think about both national identity and kind of self-identity and also kind of our romantic relationships to national identity for me, I think the way in which I might be talking having a conversation with Carlos Belosa's America is in the heart is the ways in which... people who haven't read it there are kind of two alternate endings I always find in Belosa's work there's the actual ending of the book which ends sort of very optimistically and it has a kind of line that, you know, the dream that we had of America will never sort of die on paraphrasing despite the kind of, like, long litany list of the kinds of violences that they've all sort of experienced but the previous chapter really ends with a kind of grim pessimism and loss and reckoning with the kind of both loneliness and sort of self-erasure that he's experienced and for me I think I have contentions with the idea that I think, like, national identity that there are certain sort of sort of markers of sort of Americanness or particularly maybe the kind of hopes of assimilation and keeping sort of countries in our heart that I think are there to be contended with the kinds of state violences we're talking about the passages that I read talks about American genocide in the Philippines which is not talked about enough about the ways in which the American colonial project in the Philippines was absolutely devastating to the Philippines but also completely crucial to what we would think of now as you know, American empire, American statecraft there's no sort of America that exists today without what, you know, Americans did in the Philippines at the turn of the century so for me it's really about pushing back about that idea that countries live in our hearts because for most of us, especially those of us who are marginalized in any way or experience the kind of state discrimination and violence that Bulosan's characters and then, you know, my characters in this book experience the idea of a country being in your heart is really actually morally untenable yes, yeah, yeah, yeah of course, I mean, they were talking about sort of, yeah, of course they were talking about socialism and communism and how it was working in Spain in that period but I think I'm still talking about, I mean, the phrase is still Spain in my heart and as a Filipino, that's a phrase that will never come out of my mouth unless I'm quoting other people but, you know, I still think that these kind of romantic ideas of sort of sorry, do you want to go? Our ultimate ones that we have a responsibility to contend with but thank you so that's kind of shift towards the UK and writing as a Southeast Asian in the United Kingdom for example so I was curious, what sort of factors or things that were in the UK that kind of pushed you towards writing the novel, being an American but then living in the UK was there anything in the UK that kind of encouraged you to write it or to finish the novel, was there any which might be of interest to people who are creative writers here in the UK? Well, I think probably I'm just living the cliche that many, many, many writers live which is the minute that you sort of exit the place that you grew up in or the kind of context that you grew up in, your hometown suddenly you find yourself writing about it which I mean, it does happen into a lot of writers, you know, writers who write this amazing regional literature about the particular space that they're from often don't write it in the actual place that they're talking about and I think it must be because it gives a kind of objective distance, a kind of space with which to think about the kinds of sort of historical and social and emotional sort of threads that go into making that place in ways that you couldn't when you're right there in the thick of it so I think London must have given that to me I'm not sure, yeah, I think so, I think that kind of space, I mean obviously I did do an MA here I to be honest did not love my time there and I think that I shared that experience with a lot of young writers of color who experienced just the kinds of kind of casual unfortunately kind of institutional racism and reluctance to talk about sort of writing and literature, not just through lenses of is this sentence pretty, does it work on the page or what are the kinds of in a sense sort of ethical and in a sense political implications of the ways I'm depicting for example, you know people from Pungasinan, I mean there was I remember there was a story by another student who was that was actually about Pungasinan and the person was not from Pungasinan and it was quite very, quite a class shaming, quite a classist and sexist piece in ways that I wanted to talk about but I think often in creative writing spaces there can be resistance to bringing in that level of conversation when you know we have this kind of idea that literature should just be this kind of pure neutral space but really the only people who are able to benefit from literature being a pure neutral space are the people who have access to the kind of institutional generational power that passes as neutral which tends to be white people it just does okay so let's open up questions from the audience I mean I think you should talk to a lawyer that is outrageous no I think you're I mean I have to say I am lucky enough that I don't have contracts that are that exploitative I don't know I didn't self publish, no I publish with Viking which is an imprint of Penguin Random House you should maybe talk to my agent who's in the audience again yes I'm being well paid and well compensated for my writing yes I mean not well paid in the sense of like I'm not Peter Teal no I didn't say 25% and I'm not I'm not getting into sort of figures now also because I'm literally incapable of remembering figures which is why I work with words but I think you're right no what I think you're right I think this discussion does have to be had about you know compensation around art and you know because I know especially especially in my sort of earlier career especially younger writers there's loads of younger writers who get very much exploited whose work is not paid for example writers who work for free who work for free for online publications and who don't have the tools to advocate for themselves that their work deserves to be compensated also because we have this kind of fake romantic idea that we're doing it for the art that we're not putting food on the table that we're not actually trying to sort of you know fulfill you know sort of take care of our material realities so I mean thank you for bringing that up I think the idea that writers of color are in some are in some way being compensated for are in some way being compensated for the pasts of sort of American state colonialism is ultimately a fairly racist idea but if it were true in any case if it were true in any case I would welcome that kind of state reparations which is why I think you should probably see a lawyer that's a very novel idea there in America is the story of him in the provinces and that shocking story of him his brother getting married and they have this virginity ritual with a sheet and the woman is not the virgin and they tie her to the tree and they stone her and I was like oh my god does this really happen and my manager said oh yeah it happens all the time back in my village I was like oh my god anyway you had that same impact and you talk about the pros of deciding to have this almost standalone opening sequence for the book and I thank you for that first of all the incredible kindness that just preceded that amazing question so yes the prologue of the book is not written from the perspective of the main character and the prologue of the book encompasses the first words of the book that I wrote in the summer of 2013 so it's told by the from the perspective of heroes aunt who grows up in very similar to Belosan abject rural poverty in Pangasinan and it sort of follows her poverty as a youth and then her eventual immigration to the United States as a nurse and for me for the longest time I thought I would maybe write the entire book either from her perspective or from her daughter's perspective Ronnie who was born in the Bay Area I think probably just quite simply because autobiographically I share the most sort of details with those characters I like Ronnie like Bas' daughter sort of grew up in the Bay Area our parents did the same things I kind of had the sense that I was more familiar with that world and yet I think just when I continued trying to write it the words just ended up being completely dead on the page despite the fact that supposedly I know the worlds of those characters better I think it was I found myself being really sort of defensive because of that I found myself not really being able to continue writing from Bas' perspective because I found I just I protected her a little bit too much and then hero actually hero was a character that I think I've been thinking about for a while and when it sort of came to me that hero was related to Ronnie that hero was going to come to Mopedis the kind of world of the book opened up even though I was profoundly profoundly uncomfortable with writing from hero's perspective largely because hero comes from a kind of class privilege in the Philippines that I'm not familiar with for one thing that I have a huge critique of for another thing and that ultimately I just didn't want to write a book about a wealthy some rich girl but I think ultimately it ended up being that kind of discomfort that sort of ultimately sort of mistrust of her that allowed me in a way to be free with her that allowed me to be vulnerable with her and kind of yank the rug out from her in a way that I wasn't at all able to do with Bas or with Ronnie but the way that I think exactly what you hit on the way the kind of prologue I think functions in the book kind of formally or ethically is that it also kind of provides a framework it's sort of like through this lens in particular through this lens around class and her gender and her kind of experiences as a poor rural woman in the Philippines that's the sort of filter through which everything in the book then has to be read because throughout the book Bas is actually quite a kind of reclusive it's not a kind of kind of recount like sort of yeah quite sort of sort of closed off figure you don't actually know that much from her and but it's because you know that backstory that then it's from that position that then you you move through what happens in the rest of the book yeah thank you well yeah so that as I was saying before that title America isn't the heart with a conjunction with something that has it's just been a joke in my head for years probably since I was about 14 or 15 and when I was writing the book I think it had multiple titles and I just thought that title would be the title of like a chapter or something but it just sort of kept resurging in a way and then I realized I think it was sort of quite organically sort of in the middle of writing the book that that was the title of the book for sure yeah I think so I think I think I mean obviously the kind of genesis of it comes out of this joke around sort of Budo-san's title and how it's pronounced but exactly as I was saying with my sort of previous interlocutor I think for me it's about pushing back against the idea that America or sort of these grand sort of colossal ideas of national identity are the things that we hold in us or the kinds of things that we keep in our heart as opposed to the kind of daily material, banal, granular like textural sort of realities of the kinds of lives of the people who populate this book lives of the people who are in the kind of suburban marginalized communities in the Bay Area and if anyone is in the heart or if anything is in the heart it's in these kind of tiny tiny sort of fragments and moments of how characters like those build lives with each other and build communities with each other so I think actually sorry to belabor that point but there's a the epigraph of the book comes from Budo-san and it comes from it's a passage the line of the epigraph is I knew I could trust a gambler because I had been one obviously I didn't choose it because the book is about gambling it's not a line about gambling it comes at a point where the main character has to pawn off a ring in order to pay for sort of groceries for his sick brother and so he pawns it off to someone who's a gambler and then he says this line I knew I could trust this person because I knew I could trust a gambler because I had been one and for me that very simple sort of line has always stood out as this kind of I think really searing portrait of what community actually is that we don't actually make communities often with the best part of ourselves and the best part of someone else that we actually make communities ultimately with sometimes the most vulnerable and sometimes trustworthy parts of ourselves that's the kinds of communities that can be formed when you think I can place faith in what might be thought of as mendacious and untrustworthy and flawed in you because I know for a fact that those untrustworthy mendacious and flawed parts are also in me and so I think when we think about what is in the heart then yeah it is in the kinds of sort of dailinesses of building community in that way kind of yeah very sort of tender banal and flawed parts of each other oh oh I mean that's a pretty good those are pretty two good poles to be divided between it doesn't sound that bad opposite of my parents I found that they utterly shaped my experience as a Filipino-American growing up in the Bay but I completely agree that in a way it was never talked about you do experience sometimes a kind of flattening of nuance that happens when you're a marginalized community and so your sort of your priority is sort of forming solidarity you know forming solidarity where you can with people where you can so I think that is an understandable pose to take and it's one that I often take myself but I do very clearly remember interactions with Filipino families who were from class because my parents I always say that my parents came from a very mixed class marriage I always say that my parents come from a very mixed class marriage and that by the time I was born my mom was a nurse, my dad was a security guard so for all intents and purposes it was a working class sort of lower middle class family but in the Philippines my mom as I said grown up in poverty and my father had grown up much more in comfort and was from a much more comfortable upper middle class family felt very acutely the kinds of differences in their formation that kind of shapes just not even how they interacted with each other but their sort of feelings about each other their feelings about love their feelings about themselves and I 100% felt the kind of essentially exactly as you said regional chauvinism and deep class chauvinism that I think does carry over to America even if sort of first-gen Americans like me take their entire lives until adulthood to realize oh the way this person was treating me when I was a kid was because she thought I was from a lower class than her and I think I tried to explore that a little bit in the book with the kinds of interactions that Ronnie has with a classmate of hers whose family comes from a wealthier background and by whom Ronnie is treated fairly badly without really understanding why so I think for me it is important to think about class differences both within the Philippines and within Filipino-American communities and how there is exploitation within the Filipino community based along sort of class lines and regions so for me it's very foremost in my experience of being Filipino and American you got more questions about royalties I think actually we have to give it to someone else yes oh wow yes I was born this day yeah oh for sure no for sure I think that's an experience that a lot of ultimately diasporic kids and diasporic people sort of go through and I think my generation because I'm a first-generation American so I was born in America and my parents were immigrants I think a lot of us sort of there's a kind of discourse around I think my generation which is like we're stuck between two cultures and we don't belong in either place and I think probably I'm just a contrary person but I've always a little bit sort of resisted that idea that in some way I'm incomplete or incoherent because of the kind of you know sort of social material realities that you know made me born in America for me I always say I am Filipino-American that's the kind of space I occupy it's not a incomplete space I don't even know if I would say it's a hybrid space it's just a space of its own I you know I had friends and that I love very much and I respect this trajectory but it was always kind of like I need to go back to the Philippines to sort of like get in touch with my roots and I really I have a lot of love for that impulse and I understand it and I sometimes feel it too but I think ultimately my roots are in the very shitty strip malls of the Bay Area of the suburban Bay Area and that is just this sort of in a sense authentic culturally as a kind of sort of imagined ancestral homeland that may ultimately actually be a kind of romantic fantasy so for me it's about sort of taking the kind of realities that make me and then understanding that that's a space that's a coherent sort of identity so I do feel very Filipino-American I feel very Filipino and when I'm in England I feel very American I think probably you feel the same yeah exactly before you come to England you never think you're like a loud person but then you come here and you're like oh apparently I'm very loud and opinionated exactly and they're like why are you actually having a human interaction with me so yes I mean for sure I think those kind of dailinesses are there but for me I think as diasporic sort of kids you also you also want to think about how all of those pieces sort of are okay to just sit with each other and not necessarily need to kind of make a kind of perfect whole or have to you know you don't have to sort of wrap it up in a bow that it's okay to be just in that that sort of mixed up place yeah thank you for that question yeah thank you I think well for me just personally it was important for me to depict queer characters and in particular by characters and by women of color because I'm a by woman I'm a by woman of color I would like to see more depictions of by women and sort of by women of color by Filipinas in our media I think by erasure is a real thing so for me yes it was very important to sort of depict the kind of kind of mundane kind of realities of queer women's and queer Filipino queer immigrant women's lives and I think important also to depict it in a way that doesn't kind of center I think a lot of someone was asking me the queer characters in your book they're never sort of like wrestling with or deciphering their sexuality like why was that I know it's like well do you ask hetero writers well these hetero characters are never sort of wrestling with or deciphering their sexuality so why should I assume the kind of primacy of hetero readers or the kinds of sort of like knee jerk hetero normative sort of assumptions we make about who sexuality needs to be deciphered and who's gets to pass as kind of unspoken and neutral and thus normalized so for me it's important for me to write about queer women who are immigrants queer women who are undocumented queer women who are suburban and who are ultimately non-western I think I'll you know because a lot of you know a lot of the queer fiction that I love and you know was formative for me growing up a lot of it is sort of urban or western or about sort of like the rural or the suburban is the place that I have to leave in order to sort of be realized and that's a very real trajectory that you know I have also experienced but I also know personally that's not every queer person's story so I'm also I think interested in depicting the kinds of sort of I guess multi-varied realities of queer life in which you know I think even queer as a term for me that's a term that came to me sort of pretty late in my life and late in my sexuality as a term that's ultimately to me has always sort of telegraphed a kind of academicness and a kind of ultimately also sort of whiteness because there was a lot of sort of queerness and gender queerness I mean Filipino people know a lot of sort of very sort of playful sexuality in Filipino culture there's also obviously a lot of very sort of rampant homophobia transphobia and sort of structural discrimination around sexuality but there's also you know especially in the pre-colonial sexuality of the Philippines a lot of you know very interesting sort of gender queerness and sort of and sexualities that you know that disrupt our notion of kind of hetero and queer so for me I think also about thinking about characters whose kind of journey is not necessarily the kind of western I guess sort of trajectory of coming out of using certain types of language to identify themselves as queer but you know just thinking about the kind of fullness of queer lives that come out of the community like the one I came out of. Can you give us a little bit about the process in writing this book like the editors like how did you interact with the editors when you were trying to make this book how hard were you against edits? Well I think the first draft of the book that was by some miracle sold was a thousand pages so that was a very very long book because I think apparently at the time I just didn't believe inside characters I think I you know every single care anyone who set foot in the book was sort of like you had to have their entire history the entire history of their town the entire history of both their parents and which is obviously oppressive for a reader but for me you know I love context I always think there's this beautiful yeah I just love context essentially but then eventually I did sort of you know you do realize that readers do not need to know all that information they don't need to know that you did your homework that well you just you ultimate I think I sort of realized that I'm the type of writer who writes the world first I don't know if there are writers who sort of relate to that but you write the world and then from that point you know kind of write your way you find the book in that so I think that's the type of writer that I discovered that I am in the process of writing this and as for editing I mean I think I was much more ruthless an editor than my editors expected in a way I think they did for sure want the a thousand page book to I mean obviously there are some cuts you can make in a thousand page book but I don't think they quite anticipated how much I was ready to cut and I think one editor was a little bit alarmed was like I bought a big book and you're now acting like it's going to be a novella so I this is something like four hundred four hundred something from a thousand yeah so I I stripped I was I was fairly ruthless in the editing which I like I mean I you know I'm quite clear-eyed about that and as for sort of the editing process you know I had two editors because I was working with the US editor who was the sort of lead or main editor and then I was working with a UK editor because I was here I was living in the UK which made sense at the time and I mean it was a really I was I was very very lucky with the editors that I had who are both white which is the you know the norm for much of publishing unfortunately is still largely sort of white dominated industry which is something that I think many writers and many people are sort of taking contention with about the need for kind of structural change within publishing largely but I was very very lucky to have two editors that were really ready to that not only were like hugely supportive of the book but were really ready to engage I think with the project of what the book was trying to do and then how to edit that book so for example there was from one editor some sort of hesitance and pushback around the kind of sort of all the untranslated words in in the book and sort of that editor sort of sort of fear that maybe it would be sort of too alienating for writers and I really had to in a sense sort of explain myself and my reasons and sort of pushback and say no this is why it's important both aesthetically and ethically for the book to remain this way and ultimately editing it that way will be a disservice to the kinds of sort of the things that I'm trying to do in the book and I was lucky enough that I had an editor that was ready to step up that was ready to go okay well I will be on board for that project I will support the kinds of things that you're you know trying to do as a writer which having heard from other stories from other writers especially other writers of color is not always the case so I was very lucky with the editors I had sorry go ahead oh sorry I mean I agree with the kind of intimacy of the second person the second person has always been a mode that I've really loved it's always been a mode that I always was always part of my personal canon the kind of readers that I love growing up sort of I don't know people have read Jamaica Kincaid's girl which is a master piece she uses it lots of sort of it's a mode that I often associated with kind of I think immigrant writers and writers of color and sort of writers in translation that it was quite sort of to me I always thought it was a canonical mode which is why I was very surprised when sort of the book started coming out and people started asking like whoa like brave choice the second person it's not a very kind of literary mode like people don't like the second person I was like what really good but then I think that in a sense is a kind of ultimately I think it's kind of revealing of what we think about what constitutes sort of in a way legitimate literary language or legitimate literary discourse I think a lot of our kind of conventional ideas of what a novel looks like or sounds like it's like it's told in a very stately voice in the third person you know in the kinds of sort of like sort of like large social realist sort of descriptions which is kind of fiction I love and which actually most the rest of the book sort of takes place in that voice but I never had the sense that you know the second person was in any way a kind of degraded voice which I think some people it's a voice that I love because as you said that there's a kind of intimacy to it an immediacy to it and there's also I think you can play with time I think you can play with tenses and I think that kind of spatiotemporal dimension of people's lives in a way in the first person or in the second person that's quite difficult to do in the first person and the third person so in the second person you can sort of jump around you can sort of fast forward and rewind in ways that allow you to kind of be in the interior of a character's conscience but then also kind of sort of go into the micro and then kind of blow out into the macro in ways that form really allows you to be flexible with so I love it No I don't use it all throughout I mean I probably I think probably because of what I was saying earlier about not really being able to continue just to sustain Puss's voice I just found myself increasingly becoming defensive and kind of not allowing her to be vulnerable in the sense because I was protecting her so that's probably why it just stopped there all second person all second person well thank you I've taken notes now I've taken your orders down no no no no I am sure that is done to some writers but I was very lucky to have editors who for one thing believe in literature believe in the primacy of literature and the importance of literature and believe that literature will find its readers so no I didn't have editors who pushed me in anyway on that front except for the length of the book no? No I think I probably I was much more ruthless with that I think they would have been okay with a longer book and I was like no guys those 200 that that chapter you liked is gone so children's conscience really interesting writing a history about the people who invaded you and you can you tell a little bit about that short story that you were and what you were trying to do it's called The Blind Oracle of Gotham you can even search it online it's a very short story and it's just about this fancy idea of a blind person who both assumes that he called an oracle and he's 21 years old for 500 years and so he's kind of like teamed and he's here with those bands kind of like a poor skeleton and he's the interaction with the people and I don't know why but the inspiration for that is just you know what do you think defines you as a blind person I think what I think was the problem like for me if a home was a verb I wouldn't be able to pass them because I'm always moving so it's never like I feel like it's a home for me it's just I've never really heard that much so I'm just I'm not knowing and that's kind of how it is in my piece I know the things that we cherish the most in the world and we do nothing to preserve them did you know that you wrote that? I loved it I loved it because it's like it's like a lot of us we go abroad well I went abroad and the first part of living in another country is you erase who you are and try to be one of the people that you're living amongst because you're afraid of being of all kinds of things and then the second half in my second half of living in a world now you start to think oh no way no, I'm cool who I am is cool talk a little bit about what that is and how you have this life the thing about Asia has how quickly it's changed the Asian community in the dumpling shop one day I went there and was gone nobody cares all about you right? you close your attention while you're kind of looking ahead to the view and the old then kind of becomes sort of a problem I think the piece you're referring to was a piece about my grandmother's house and the whole that's in your family that you visit as a child it's kind of special meaning to you it just becomes a critical important place where you can feel assertive and not necessarily to a country but to a certain place of house and it's been replaced by condos so you know it's kind of a way in which development is over and all the changes are often so I think a lot of the work that we're doing and Ryder and his readers is preserving places in our imagination that will not exist in the real world and the way it comes to come I almost realized the place that existed in the real world didn't really exist as such so that's that's kind of an interesting realization so long as the furniture there's an added thing that happens to us as well as people who have been colonized that I'm probably going to be married years and we're under under the common economy in the 15 years of Hollywood and you live that and when you begin trying to write it because writing is all about going deep and scratching the scab that you know, that's a festival inside you and you want to tell that story and one of the scams that I scratch is the story that I don't know about myself because it's our history but we're working by now in a country known by our invaders and so the truth is missing and so one of the things that I see when I write is I'm trying to find that truth that I have never been taught I've never learned about it I've never done many, many radicals what's really, really interesting that it reads Southeast Asian literature is how food is so much a part of that of that narrative and it certainly is very, very neat in Gina, who has who has had a long career is in catering working in the hospitality industry has contributed to a lot of folks about food for some strange reason I think it's easy to identify the Southeast Asian I think you can say, not just the Philippines but Southeast Asia generally is a food thing going on there well I think in general we are working in the hospitality industry which is a sour, sweet element of how food can be approved which about captures exactly what we are and I'm not just talking in terms of pace and you mentioned about the pace and all that because they're about the same culture but that still happens and that's still an agenda between them not just for people from my generation but I could say for these millennials they're still there all you have to do is limit yourself as you know you're different but how is that said if you're concerned about I think room space so in actually identifying a person that's one thing that we've tried to do some of you might have never know what they will stop and for that it's what we're trying to do is actually put the stamp on what we are by what means and how we express that and how we promote them and how now so many people and I'm not going to talk because I am how so many people now know this that we are here we are a big city we are a big city we are a big city these are all we want as a people and if I can write about it if you can write about it then so be it but that has to be the same can I bring Karla a little sarcastic but she also writes about food a lot cooks a lot and so what do you have one of the things that really surprised me about Elaine's book was the fact that if you have a great feeling she's first generation she's not like us we're the migration people so we would have memories of food but you wrote a lot about food and that surprised me because I thought my own children who are going up who are going to be like you they're going to be thinking about food as well you know Karla can you come into this and talk a little bit about food and identity I think in the way that Gina was saying about going broke and what it means about that makes us think suddenly about food and write about food is that it is a crucial part of not just our memories of the nostalgic food but also the discovery of identity I think interacting with the second generation living house of rule for example it is quite a part of the way things covered the history and history of the parents and it is a particularity I think that feeds into let's just say all people who are humans have always moved we will always be this in the world but how we locate ourselves as Filipinos and other nationalities of diaspora populations comes out in the uniqueness of aspects of our lives so it's not just talking about moving and what we found at the other end that whole movement and how we adapt and remember where we came from manifest itself in food among other things so how do we talk about where we came from and how we found ourselves in the other society it's not just talking about our histories but other aspects of our existence eating the social aspects of food which is quite prominent in Southeast Asian culture it's not just about eating out it's about family sharing there's also hunger the experience of scarcity which all goes into that whole narrative about food which is why such a rich mind for people who write in diaspora Nathan you're writing a literary novel but you've got recipes you've got us a food blog it's kind of weird but it kind of makes sense why are we doing that I love eating food we're going to film a food and we're going to film a food for example you guys need to finish the show what are you going to do what are you going to do but you just wrote about the the third of that date you made yourself like re-shaping yourself re-shaping yourself be more of the Filipino anyway I don't know what you're talking about so I looked at the list of things and actually I want to end them all in the class that says under western eyes European writings on Southeast Asia I've been writing I've been writing a novel I was looking for an authentic Filipino voice from that Europe written voice in history and there was nothing everything written about the Philippines from 1899 were filtered through American Diaries so it's all very racist historical accounts and so I was really interested that you were teaching this course I mean who attends this what did you say can you say in about 4 minutes I'm a teacher so I teach I teach so I teach so I teach so I teach I teach thousands of languages in English so that's fine but not just in the English translation the idea is that it's two different but a little bit ethical about these courses because I actually might have searched the whole thing so I said the curriculum okay so you should read it in the original but you know what the language is so the course is kind of teaching in English and because of that you teach what you need I'm working the British Library at home and I'm always really excited about the Southeast Asia ancient monasteries and if anyone's been to the British Library find the Southeast Asia go up to the third or the fourth floor and there's a cabinet and that's the Southeast Asia and they change the exhibition once every four or six months and I was really really excited because I didn't realize there was literature in Southeast Asia I had never been taught to think Southeast Asians had different literature and so I'm always visiting that God forsaken it's wonderful I subscribe to the Asia there's a blog the British Library of Asia something blog it's like a jigsaw puzzle in the world and you've got the missing piece and unfortunately the missing piece is about you and also what you teach is what they are how do you do that it's a weird situation I used to be a Christian but in English I used to be I'm here mainly as a cautionary sailor I did so much stuff in the boats nobody does that the Southeast Asians are all wandering around the third or the second floor so Cheryl sits next to that and Cheryl is like oh my god I can't believe your website it's like books plays and you're writing a YA novel young adult YA is young adult in case you're not a children's writer you're writing a young adult novel but I'm not really familiar with that you're not a young adult you're here as a publisher and your books are very interesting because they are like a list of the ideal publisher which is like a congressman want to achieve their culture how do you set out becoming a publisher in books like that so I set out my women's writer's work and started with publishing and writing and then we went to publish the first collection of Black and Asian playwrights and so we've gone on to doing the collections and recently I've done a collection of plays by Southeast Asian playwrights the first copycats was organised by two great companies called Southeast Asian playwrights and they've been brought over with British East Asian playwrights who are totally modest so that was a very interesting conference because the Southeast Asians realised that actually they had some advantages because they're not minorities in that country if you're a Southeast Asian what do you mean by they're not the minority in the world if you're a Singaporean you're not the minority only as a fourth so I had Alvin Satz say it to me and he said the whole experience is totally inside so I was very interested in what Alvin said because she seemed very self-aware about the multiple identities and this was the subject of our conference that you can have multiple identities and you don't have to choose one or the other it's to be able to enrich you you can enrich you you don't have to be a nobody in between you can have all these multiple cultural personalities going on inside there's voices to write on and personally I understand that because I'm not British I've lived in Australia I've lived in New England I've lived in Singapore for 5 years I've lived in France so I've been living everything inside me which is great I get a bit of a polly and when I was in Singapore they told me it wasn't great so I've gone from that to that and I feel like I'm in Australia and I'm as anti-colonial myself I'm really interested so you were kind of at the head of the current venue publishing diverse books before anyone else would give anything around to see the hashtag and can you tell us because there's a lot of people criticising that movement saying well at least they know that there's books in the middle of the set do they set? or has it been started? what stands in the way of success? you're just making my life different my hospitality is mixed race so I'm also at which one that's more interesting certainly we never embark on it do you think times are changing now? because there is a lot changing there's a lot more interest and there's a lot more willingness to stop the purchasing of bookshops that is a problem so I think in reality when someone said about bookshops dating 9% I'm sorry, if only then you get 60% percent to the bookshops then you have to pay the student then you have to pay book reps and then you pay for books but I think you get 5% there which has to be in your office it's ridiculous so why do you do it? that's a very good question because my books have been relatively unsuccessful but my main brand and butter is appearing on diversity panels cultural discussion and what the people don't realize I grew up in Philippines I haven't grown up in a diverse place so speaking about diversity for the first few years I'm just a simple type of everybody who works but let's move on to Carla you felt a little bit about food earlier you write this really kind of writing commentary you write articles in your classroom and you're hoping you'll write about food someday yeah I don't I think just also contextualizing thinking about writing has changed I've only kind of recently been writing fiction for example I've always written poetry and I've lived in Philippines but that kind of the movie somewhere else I think triggered something like what they like well first of all the commentary about political ethics is getting harder and harder to write because so terrible writing in particular requires that you master all aspects of that particular thing you cannot summarize something if you don't know all aspects second of all I think moving to a country like here which I did not plan to do in the first place I was just here for a year and in the experience everyone in my family moved to the world moved to the US and there is kind of a monoculture going on there about the diaspora it's the kind of goal it's the aspirational thing nobody thinks nobody did when I was growing up surely speaking English but really yeah and I remember watching this thing the full monty and I was like oh no it's this in Ireland I had no idea about Shepard and of course I never imagined that I would end up there studying and when I landed there I was like okay so I don't speak English after all you know and my own not my own literacy but it was just shocking to kind of come across the land which again in this context and so I think that has triggered something about wanting to write not just about my personal experience but it also kind of being a migrant to me in a semi-familiar situation which came which I had already experienced previously when I lived briefly in the park for example and in Thailand it kind of looks like you the language in Indonesia of course sounds very similar not just Tagalog but the local northern language but yeah I couldn't understand the thing so it was very strange it sounds familiar but it's completely different and as a Southeast Asian I also only got to think of myself as a Southeast Asian when I went to Indonesia where everybody was like I just thought I was a bit slow or not I'm sorry I'm not from here I couldn't really connect with anyone because the language was barrier but I think about it more like the rolling of ours I know that certain words like that I think which is why I into a different bit of writing it's almost like I wanted to synthesize the kind of experience and not really talking just about my own thing but stories telling stories it's a really interesting concept the Southeast Asian writing because Southeast Asians don't think of yourself as a Southeast Asian until I started to read to read more about our colonial history and realized that we were all kind of bonded together that's fairly recent in the last six months I don't know you do you think of yourself as Southeast Asian do you think of yourself as Southeast Asian I think of myself as Native I guess but do you ever think of yourself as Southeast Asian like you know the way the Chinese let me say something here I was looking at old maps in Portobello market and they say oh it's a map of the Far East I look at it it's not in the net so where is this Far East you're talking about and then people for example in the north that I was going about and they said well and of course in this country Asian it's not in the net it's not even in the net so yeah people keep telling me who am I from I think I know where I come from if you're trying to write a novel which is like a really long undertaking which of course goes into your soul and search for all kinds of things that you don't know about and you're trying to write this Southeast Asian writer how are you finding yourself in that when you're searching I want to come to Emma now I think the poet is firing writers in the audience nobody raises their hand it's okay you're safe so Emma is a literary agent she's Elaine's literary agent if you want to have a big advance you can come to us and do book tours you need to get to know Emma she's in the bathroom she's going to go later to ask you as a literary agent do you get a lot of manuscripts like Elaine's keep the door the way that I want to finish is to look for a lot of work for them to represent so obviously you know you want to look them up and they are used by writers who are looking for representation and I try to look at everything that comes to me by email but I also I try to find the time to take a proactive approach to finding the voices of fiction and nonfiction and so that involves going to reading like the one where I was lucky enough to encounter Elaine can you tell us about how did you discover it I love to tell you about that what was it what was it I really like that I'm very softly spoken I'm very softly spoken just okay is that better no is that better so in 2014 in 2014 no no it wasn't 2013 I joined in 2013 and it was maybe whenever it was fascinating contribution whenever it was I went to it's actually one of those evenings where you've kind of got it scheduled sorry it's diarised and then you know you don't necessarily want to go but anyway I forced myself to go with a colleague of mine who I still work with and the way those showcases work if you haven't been to one before is that you get given something like this with the name of the writer and the name of the excerpt that they're reading and you sit through a lot of a lot of writers maybe 2025 a lot of writers and sometimes you leave halfway through and luckily I stayed till the end because I think I'm almost right at the end and I'm sorry to embarrass you but really as soon as Elaine started reading from what is now the prologue in this novel the kind of energy in the room shifted like completely changed and you can feel other people feeling that in the audience anyway so my colleague and I were writing notes to each other and we both wrote a note I can't remember what it was but it was basically like you know we've got to go and speak to her and and then at the end we did and then it sort of happened from there so a lot of it was the voice that got you well I think yeah absolutely the voice also the kind of there's something that happens on the page in Elaine's work but there's something else as you were all lucky enough to hear that happens in the there's a kind of oral quality to it that not every prose writer has and that was communicated so forcefully and immediately in this reading so and you just sort of know in the same way that when you open a book in a bookshop when you're maybe thinking about what to buy you know really really quickly if it's a writer that you want to know. What about all the weird language and the Pongasina and the Vod and the all the weirdness of the Filipino um okay to be honest it never it never crossed my mind it just you know I'm not kind of that's a totally authentic statement I just you know I see I think the role of the agent in both the business side and the creative side or the way I see it is one of facilitation so on the business side that's about finding you know getting the author a deal finding an editor, finding the right editor and on the creative editorial side if you are an agent who engages editorially before the work is taken out to editors it's about sort of asking questions and saying you know clarifying in conversation what is it that you want to do here what are you trying to achieve what's your vision and how best can we talk about it really in order for you to execute that vision it's never about imposing um it's all about the integrity of the work and the internal logic of the work it's never about imposing um I don't know some kind of market imperative that you might have in your mind for me yeah I hope so you can put all your weirdness as long as you've got a voice yeah so we've got to talk to RJ now so RJ published a she published two books now so far and they're photography books there's stories told in a different way and the first one was by Tommy Halphala this is a photographer who visited the Cordillera mountains to document life and culture in the mountains this is the setting of my forthcoming novel coming out in August over the 13th of July here it's so as anyway but what's really what really interested me was how he talked about how change was so fast every time he came back everything changed and I was really really struck by that when I was researching my book because my book is in 1899 pre-American invasion and everyone I interviewed about cultural practices that I found recorded in anthropological texts would say oh we're Christians now we don't do that anymore like they were ashamed of it like they had been made ashamed of those practices that they had done and I'm very curious could you talk about how Tommy Halphala created this documentation over three how many years? well he started in 1978 but the book spans 1981 to 2004 I think 2001 so it's 30 on years and they're not Christian anymore they're now Episcopalian is that different from Christian? I think Tommy approached it from I would call it like a history from below because a lot of the observations unlike photographic history a lot of the representations still that exist still tend to come from a western perspective so this is one of the you know I imagine or I'd like to think more authentic voices that he believes that he sorry I was trying to humble with my words it's more like a history from below where instead of people observe that you know outsiders observe what they would call the tribes it's giving you know Tommy giving them you know opportunity to explain what it is that they believe in rather than an outsider's perspective I haven't seen the book which I'm desperate to own does it have like captions and yeah the details the captions are quite detailed and a lot of it to sort of talk about the misrepresentation of the people for a long time about the beliefs that people uphold and one of the difficulties of Southeast Asia and the Philippines is that it's not one culture it's like Africa being constantly written about as if it's one country and the it's the same like you just go to the mountains in the Philippines and you've got all of these tribes with very very disparate practices and a lot of people in the Philippines we just lump it into one one story he writes about quite a few tribes three or four are documented so the Cordilleras are composed of different regions like in Scotland you would call them the Highland tribes so this would be the Filipino version of the Highland tribes but then each different ethno-linguistic group indeed divided by the language have similar but at the same time you know the little things that differ that differ from each other from a tribe he is from Ilocos he's Ilocano but he is now accepted as one of the elders because throughout his documentation the people there rely on an oral history and so he's the only one that's actually written down a lot of the prayers, a lot of the sequences of rituals there are some rituals that only happen every 10 years so he's been lucky enough to have attended two but three you know three of those in the last 30 years and elders now go to him because they don't remember what sequence the rituals ago was there any kind of feeling that he was appropriating their culture in America there's an activism about cultural appropriation which is applied you know you might be American but you're not Native American so you mustn't write in our voice that's our voice and you've been treating us badly for these years was there any kind of... there is historical blood between the Ilocanos and the Cordilleras not at all I think of their practices and just wanted to document it objectively he did the work so to learn more about that we're doing the Cordillera conference in July at the time there was a resurgence of the publishing of photo books a lot of young publishers were coming to us for us to finish the books and the images that they worked on and I decided that it was something that I could do in the Philippines but at the same time also Southeast Asia there is problematics and representation in both literature and photographic or visual publishing that there's really a lack of voice especially photography so I find I feel that literature has really come a long further as opposed to representation of people so I thought it was something that I I can do and I should do so I have done it's not easy so you can watch a photograph how do we give a proposal to you ask it for a friend that's the problem though and I'm sure that whose books need to be published that haven't been published so you have a lot more to do well I invite you Elaine to respond to what you have heard so far and whether this because you are you're not you're younger than most of us and we came before you and we're all trying to tell our stories in all our different ways can you respond to what you have heard so far I was listening in fascination to everybody but I love hearing all of these different experiences and different ways of thinking about our diasporas or places that we come from I really want this books please write down that title for me probably two things I think I really agree with something that was said about that sort of tension and the kind of representation between what we might call East Asian East Asian community and Southeast Asian community and that's for me I'm coming out with a largely Asian American sort of community and context and it's something that I talk about often to other Southeast Asian friends so you were asking do I sort of identify Southeast Asian and I do only as a kind of identity of solidarity and that like in my soul obviously yes I'm Philippine American my dad did look on at my mom's point and said that's actually the kind of and I'm from the Bay that's the kind of sort of that's the kind of sort of subject positionality I come from I do sort of also stake out that Southeast Asian territory I think if only because a lot of the times in our kind of representations of Asian America it often does tend to be East Asian American so they're in the kind of literature that's sort of or literature or films or sort of representation where we have the Asian representation at least in America often largely tends to be East Asian American largely middle class or upper middle class sort of increasingly also Southeast Asian middle class or upper middle class and we see much much much less of sort of poor working class Southeast Asians of the kinds that you know I grew up with and I'm familiar with and I think it's it's important to also sort of be sort of both inclusive and nuanced when we think about sort of Asian American or Asian American those kinds of identities of solidarity I mean I think it's also important to talk about the kind of intra exploitation within Asian communities the kind of exploitation that for example Filipino laborers would experience in Singapore like that's not you know to not talk about all of those types of sort of dynamics and power dynamics and class issues is also then to kind of flatten the reality of sort of Asian life today and Asian history and for me it's so for me I think that's really what a discussion like this is able to facilitate because then we can you know talk about all of the kind of different sort of angles that were coming from it and then you have actually a kind of nuanced approach to thinking about you know southeast Asian writing and then the the kind of project that Kristina very importantly is bringing to us and I think probably I would probably just end with thinking would agreeing wholeheartedly with what Emma said about you know the integrity of the writing being being prime like really sort of encouraging writers here obviously there's no writers here so I don't know I'm sorry but oh engaging with writers here I'm just talking to you she's a writer engaging with writers here to have a really firm reminder to not be palatable to not deform your writing or the project that you're doing for some kind of imagined ultimately white sort of reader that's not you that's not the people that you're writing about so write the thing that only you can write the thing that you most urgently have to write about because guaranteed that is going to be the thing that readers will respond to because that's because you feel that as a reader I mean all of us as writers I think is safe to say our readers first and foremost and we remember what it's like to read books that make you feel like I mean the word representation is actually it's a word that I often think is so impoverished it's like tolerance nobody wants to be represented nobody wants to be tolerated these are things about the kind of visceral joy and sort of effect of seeing the Bay Area in fiction if you don't see the Bay Area that looks like yours in any kind of depictions of California like I mean depictions like that just what they do really is to tell you you are real which is to say your writing is the world you're living in is real the people around you is real the context the reality that you know that is real you know like in our kind of mainstream white people don't ever need to be told that they're real they never have to contend with that in that kind of fundamentally sort of existential I'm not saying that people of any sort of background don't have existential issues but in that particular way you know we are surrounded by images that kind of reinforce the realness of a very particular subset of people so the kind when we talk about that we need diverse books and we don't need just diverse books we need diverse agents, editors, publishers sort of gatekeepers in all in all aspects we also we need more of fiction and art that is commensurate to the realities that we're actually living and if you write that stuff guaranteed readers will come to you Thank you Elaine I just wanted to respond to you when I was a kid most people in the audience who are my age which is like 50 something from the Philippines or from somewhere else in Asia will remember growing up with our school books which had Look Here, Jane, Dick all those characters and loving those books growing up with books that we love that didn't have faces that look like us and I was one of those kids and I fell in love with books and I wanted to become an author but it was very clear from the books that I read that Filipinos were not allowed to be and it was only when I came here to England when I realized that people could hear my story that my stories were worthy of being between the pages of these objects that I loved so much books and that was the only time that I tried and to my surprise audiences did want to read my story and they continued to do so so there is hope there are a lot of issues but I think we just have to have faith in our stories and just keep telling them in every way that we can in particular Southeast Asia Southeast Asia is not a reality to most people in England but I think that certainly the stories of other we are so various I did a workshop in Singapore a few years ago where I had a group of people who were from Thailand Macau, Hong Kong, China Taiwan, Philippines all over and it was mind-boggling because every single individual was fascinating and had so much to tell and you think about all of these stories that are not making it out there and you think of how we can enable that if only we have to begin somewhere and we are all in the beginnings this is the beginning of it and thank you for organizing it Christina I think we have to end there we have a writer and then there are many changes the book sign may now take their place