By Pinoy in America
To the multitude of voices telling the story of Filipinos in America add two more. The Literacy Initiatives International Foundation’s latest conversation with Filipino-American writers will feature Gemma Nemenzo, author of Heart in Two Places: An immigrant’s journey, and Lorenzo Paran III, who wrote An Isteytsayd Life: Not-so-random thoughts from a Pinoy living in America. The event will be on July 16 at the Daly City Public Library at Serramonte.
Nemenzo is best known in the Filipino-American community as the hand at the helm of Filipinas Magazine, of which she was managing editor from 2003 to 2010 and where her popular column, “Slant,” appeared.
Heart in Two Places gathers those pieces, which the San Francisco Chronicle’s Ben Pimentel has hailed as “eloquent explorations of the Filipino American journey from various viewpoints—that of an expat, a woman and mother.”
Paran, a copy editor with the Los Angeles Newspaper Group, wrote his book—in installments—on his blog, Pinoy in America, which he began soon after moving to the U.S.
“It was a way to make sense of my new life,” says Paran, an English teacher at the University of the Philippines before migrating, of his blog (pinoyinamerica.blogspot.com).
What makes the pairing of these two writers interesting is that while they come from similar Philippine backgrounds—Nemenzo also studied at the U.P., graduating with a journalism degree—they tell two contrasting stories.
Nemenzo talks about the challenges she faced when she decided to leave her marriage in the Philippines and raise her three children on her own in a new country, challenges which, while not unique to Nemenzo, rarely find as poignant and moving an expression as that found in Heart in Two Places.
“It gave me a purpose,” Nemenzo says of the difficulties she faced in her first years in the U.S.
Another theme running through Heart in Two Places is Nemenzo’s political involvement. She devotes a number of pieces recounting her days as a journalist in the Philippines and as a witness to the struggles of the Philippine left. It’s an activism that naturally takes root in her adopted land as shown in her reflections on the political realities of contemporary American life. Her pieces on the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks are some of the most moving in the collection.
Paran, who belongs to a slightly younger generation, talks almost solely of the challenges he faced as an individual and uses his essays as a vehicle for his humorous takes on Filipino-American life. What’s the word for gay Filipinos? “Half-Pinoy, half-Pinay,” Paran reports in one of his pieces on English.Language is a constant subject for Paran, who was a literature major—and from 1995 to 2004, an English instructor—at the UP.
He left for the U.S. in 2004 “to get married,” he says.
He left for the U.S. in 2004 “to get married,” he says.
His then-girlfriend had moved to the U.S. a few months earlier, and “she begged me to come,” Paran says with a wink and a smile.
In Southern California, with lots of free time, he found himself writing to tell his friends back home about his new surroundings. He wrote them long emails.
“But they looked more like ‘mini-essays,’” Paran says. It wasn’t long after that when he thought of starting a blog. He called it “Pinoy in America.”
“Because I realized that’s what I was,” Paran says. “I was no longer a Pinoy in the Philippines. I was still a Pinoy—but in America.”
The blog found an audience among Filipinos both in the Philippines and the U.S., and that’s what led to the book deal with the UP Press. A second book seems to be on the way as Paran hasn’t stopped posting new material on his blog.
Not surprisingly, both Nemenzo and Paran discuss the theme that permeates Filipino-American writing in general: the dual nature of expatriate life.
Nemenzo talks about her first years in America, when she “straddled two countries, unable to decide where I really belonged”—a sentiment that leads her to say her heart is in two places at the same time, giving the book its title.
This theme of duality also runs through much of An Isteytsayd Life.
“The life of a Pinoy in America can be a dizzying one,” Paran writes. “When you’re in America, it often seems you are waiting for that day when you will be ‘back home.’ But when you get there, you feel restless…because you know your life is waiting for you back in America… You’re here, but your mind is there.”
It’s a dilemma the two writers manage to resolve at the end, in similar ways.
Nemenzo finds a sense of resolution through community involvement, which is one of the constants in her life, from her time in the Philippines to now. Perhaps, that is what sustains her.
Character is not defined by one’s leaving one’s country to live and work in another land, she says. Rather, it’s determined by how one gives back to one’s community.
Perhaps right there can be gleaned Nemenzo’s philosophy as a writer, as a woman and as a Filipina. Her present work as head of the Literacy Initiatives International Foundation, a San Francisco Bay Area nonprofit that promotes cultural literacy among Filipino Americans and other ethnic communities, seems to attest to that.
Paran does not explicitly speak of a commitment to serve his community, but he expresses his conviction to live “in the present.”
In the last chapter of his book, he says he will always be “Pinoy,” although one with a full awareness of where he presently is.
“You try to live in two countries, and you end up living in neither,” he writes. The statement can be read as an admonition to his readers, but it’s possibly also a reminder that Paran issues to himself, more than to anyone else.
Finally, Nemenzo and Paran, separated by a generation and by their personal circumstances, also are bound by their devotion to writing. But while they sought comfort in their craft and looked only for a vehicle to share their experience, it’s clear that they’ve discovered much more—including, assuredly, a sense of home.
Heart in Two Places was published by Anvil Publishing Inc. An Isteytsayd Life was published by the University of the Philippines Press.
For more information on the July 16 event at the Daly City Public Library-Serramonte, contact Karen Engle, library services manager, at kengle@dalycity.org or Bess Calpotura, outreach coordinator of the Filipino American International Book Festival, at besscalpo@comcast.net.
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What: Author’s talk featuring Gemma Nemenzo, Lorenzo Paran III
When: 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. July 16 (Saturday)
Where: Daly City Public Library, 40 Wembley Drive, Daly City
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