Telling the stories of her family and community
M. Evelina Galang grew up in Wisconsin around Czechoslovakian, German, and Polish kids, writing about their stories but never her own.
“I was writing stories I thought people would want to read, and I never read stories from a Filipino American perspective,” said Galang.
She didn’t consider telling stories from her own community until one of her teachers suggested it. “That’s when I started to think about the stories that went on in my family and the struggles and sacrifices that my parents had made to come to the United States from the Philippines.”
“When the Hibiscus Falls,” released June 13, is the result of a 10-yearlong project: a collection of 17 of the author and professor’s short stories centering generations of Filipino and Filipino American women and their experiences with loss, joy, family, community, and identity.
As with much of her work, the collection focuses on women who have “traditionally been silenced,” as in “Fighting Filipina” where a young woman named Mahal is deeply disturbed by the anti-Asian hate rising during the pandemic, but the community’s suffering seems invisible to everyone else.
The collection is also a means of preservation, including memories from her late father, a storyteller whose tales began to slip away when he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. She wanted his stories to be passed on even when he wasn’t there to tell them.
“And in terms of the Filipino American community, we have stories that we hand off to one another, usually it’s around the dinner table, usually it’s at parties, usually it’s through gossip,” Galang said. “This collection is really tapping into the different ways that we remember one another through story.”
Galang recalled trying to create a list of 10 Filipino American writers in graduate school in 1993. She couldn’t fill it. Now, she explained, there are enough Filipino American authors that she can’t fit them onto a single page. She wants to continue to share her community’s stories with her family and beyond.
“When I got to be an auntie, with all my nephews and nieces,” she said, “it became abundantly clear that they needed stories to support all the stories that their lolo — their grandfather — and their lola had been telling them about being Filipino American.”
M. Evelina Galang will be in conversation with Grace Talusan at 7 p.m. on July 28 at Brookline Booksmith.