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 |  Blog and other works of literary sense |
| Here is a collection of ruminations and whatnot. |
| I recently video blogged about my writing. One of the topics was about my most recent novel, On Days Like This. The novel is about an Asian American woman who gets a job at Yale University and gets embroiled in a very bad plot to make her die. The novel has the theme of racism in the workplace, and in the halls of an Ivy League university. The idea to write about Mary Enji Scott, the daughter of a Japanese man and a white wife, was give to me by inspiration. I hesitated to write about the Asian-American experience. I was partly raised in the Philippines, an island country in the Pacific. Then I immigrated to the USA in the 1970s and was thrown into a world full of white people. There were a number of Fllipino families that my family befriended in Indianapolis. But I was basically someone who evolved in my personality as a person of the world, a citizen, if you could call me, of the world, and not really someone who thought of myself as mainly a Filipino-American. Those days I did not know I had English parents. I was adopted which nobody told me about. Not until recently. The novel was something that I decided to accept as my next work and project. I wanted to show to the world that there is racism in many places and even in places where you might not expect. I wanted to show that Asian-Americans, and, Asians per se, are good and noble people, who aspire to the same goals as anyone else. Asians are very productive, industrious, and mostly peaceable people. They do as they are told, most of the time, and tend to be meek. But they do have feelings and when they are ostracized, or made to feel marginalised, they become self-involuted in that they can't talk about their hardships with anyone. There is this feeling they have that they can't turn to anyone outside of their families, nor even outside their ethnic group. I think that the Black Lives Movement has placed racism to the forefront of the consciousness of society everywhere. I went through life in different work places and in these places the thought of being racially profiled wasn't obvious to me, perhaps because I didn't want to recognize it. I had an optimistic view of people. I looked at people as equals, as worthy of my respect and even my love should love be part of the relationship. I made many friends, or so I thought. But I noticed that the ethnic groups did not have many interactions with the white majority populations. They were useful to some political groups as people they needed to curry votes from, but not as real friends nor even people who they could build a family with. Those who married out of their ethnic groups were not very many in my experience. There still was a stigma to biracial couples even in the 1980s where I placed Mary Enji Scott (my main character on On Days Like This). In the novel, I wrote a dialogue between Mary and one of the technicians in the laboratory where the technician told her that children of biracial couples were looked down upon and were sad always. It was a dialogue where I derived it from an actual happening. I thought that this speech by a white woman in a liberal arts university was so scandalizing that I tried to think it was a joke at the time. But that wasn't a joke. There are many facets of biracial couples' lives that are so filled with sadness and they tend to find it hard to be a part of the environment and society. The fact that some of their families are racially profiled is a sad thing to realize. Yet, even in corporate workplaces, many of those who are of the minority are not recognized and given promotions. It is not easy to excel in places that have this racial meme in their workplaces. Many places pay lip service to giving equality in their hiring. But they merely fill the slots for the forms where they have hired a minority employee. It's not an easy life in the USA. But life here can be good if only people recognize that each of us is a Godly person and worth our respect and our love. |
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