Nietes-Little

New and Ancient Culture

After arriving in the U.S., Linda moved to Westwood. At that time, she frequently rode the bus through the Wilshire corridor full of shops and places for rent — a good location for a bookshop, she thought. Linda had no model to work from. It would be the first Philippine bookshop in the U.S.

Linda opened Philippine Expression specifically to help inform young Filipinos of their culture. Of the 4.2 million Filipino Americans in the U.S., more than 500,000 live in Los Angeles as of 2019. She noted a large number of young Filipinos have never been to the Philippines.

In 1984, you could count on one hand the number of Filipino authors. Now there are many. The self-publishing trend too, she said, has helped.

“You must love it with a passion to have a career as a bookseller, otherwise you won’t last,” she said. “I could have had another career in finance … that’s my training. But that’s not really building a community.”

When she was in Westwood, Linda said UCLA students would come in for books — Americans of Philippine ancestry. The next time she saw them they would have PhDs and some worked in academia. They told her the books reinforced their feelings about being Filipino. That made it even more interesting to her because she’d like to feel she helped a lot, “in the literal sense,” the education of her people and making them engage in reading, in books and writing.

“[When the] Spaniards saw the beautifully tattooed inhabitants of the archipelago — not a republic — that’s why they called the Filipinos Las Pintates or The Painted Ones,” Linda said. “[With] beautiful designs and different colors on their bodies, that only gives you the idea that even before the west came to the Philippines, we already had our sense of culture, our sense of ethics. And of course 350 years of Spanish colonization destroyed all that. Then the Japanese came, then the Americans and now we’re free but not totally free because there are remnants of colonization in the psyche of our people.

“That’s why offering the books for the young people to read, to make them proud of their ancestry, I hope to build their self respect, well being and pride in their culture.”

Philippine Expressions Bookshop

479 W. 6th St., San Pedro

Open 2 to 6 p.m. Saturday and by appointment. 310-514-9139; www.philippinebookshop.com and info@philippinebookshop.com