San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
‘All I needed was a change of perspective’
MARIVI SOLIVEN LOCAL AUTHOR WHO HAS TAUGHT WRITING WORKSHOPS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO AND AT THE UNIVERSITY OF THE PHILIPPINES
Icame across President Meri’s quote last spring and adopted it as a personal slogan as the ensuing months turned ever more grim. Framing 2020 in this way enabled me to accept that this was a season better suited to gathering stories than writing them.
The COVID-19 pandemic snuffed out not only lives, but also creative endeavors, mine included. In January, the film adaptation of my novel “The Mango Bride” was inching toward the first day of filming, with its screenplay completed, most of the lead roles cast and funding in the home stretch. Additionally, I had begun talking with Marc Chery at the San Diego Central Library and professors at UC San Diego about organizing a sequel to “Centering the Margins: Conversations With Writers of Color.” Our first all-poc literary conference in 2018 drew writers, publishers, agents and publicists from across the country to San Diego and was such a success that we thought we could turn it into a biennial event.
The pandemic erased all that. In March, President Rodrigo Duterte suspended all film production in the Philippines as the country went on lockdown. When the San Diego Public Library shut down and UC San Diego pivoted to online classes, plans for our symposium were suspended indefinitely.
I would still be despairing over those canceled projects but for President Meri’s piquant advice. All I needed was a change of perspective.
While writing projects fizzled out, my day job as a telephonic interpreter caught fire. Suddenly I had half as much time to write but double the material for stories, for as the pandemic gained deadly momentum, I began taking more calls that bore the mark of this pitiless disease.
In one heartbreaking conversation, a grandmother refused to be intubated despite suffering from advanced COVID-19 pneumonia, and it fell to me and the doctor to explain why she couldn’t spend her remaining days at home, surrounded by family. Another day, a lawyer needed help translating his client’s petition for compassionate release because of the COVID-19 outbreak in San Quentin. And a health department official in British Columbia individually thanked 14 Filipino farmworkers for completing the government-funded two week quarantine, “because without your agricultural expertise the people of Canada would go hungry.”
Imagine that happening in this country. These and many other calls are the rich soil upon which I hope to grow next year’s crop of stories, not least because Filipinos — notably nurses — have been dying from COVID-19 at disproportionately higher rates than other Asian American populations.
It’s heartening to know that the Bidenharris administration will be more supportive of the arts than the outgoing president, who has continually tried to defund the National Endowment for the Arts. As a senator, Kamala Harris notably endorsed a resolution to recognize Filipino American History Month, as well as efforts to acknowledge the cultural contributions of other ethnic groups.
When it is once more safe to gather, I hope to organize a second “Centering the Margins” conference and continue the conversation about how writers, filmmakers and publishers of color might best address our specific challenges and concerns. My last hope may be a long shot for 2021, but because my novel begins in Manila and ends in California, I look forward to the day travel restrictions are lifted, so that the film adaptation of “The Mango Bride” can finally begin.
“The situation may be s---, but it’s our fertilizer for the future”
Lennart Meri, former president of Estonia, 1992