About Bataan New Jersey
Excerpt from Bataan New Jersey, page 500.
After they had piled twenty bodies by the grave’s edge, they paused on how they might put them inside as Tasio had instructed. Shouldn’t the heaviest go last? Efren wondered as logic dictated the heaviest on top like paperweight to keep the bodies in place, but asked instead, And how do we get them in? They took the ends of the cloth and A-one A-two A-three swung the bodies into the grave. Efren groaned softly and wrinkled his face at a body bouncing off the sides and scuffing against the others. Gus shook his head at him, Don’t stare, Five more! They did a few more until the slightest thud became unbearable. This is not a burial, commented Efren as he wiped his nose with his arm, noticing more the inexplicable stench, This is not even human.
We are not done. Now we have to arrange them in place.
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Efren and Gus watched Tasio clamber down into the shallow grave, whimpering a bit to collect himself and looking up to say, At funerals, we dress up our dead in their best clothes to prepare them for their next journeys, It is how the beast became human, Our rituals make us human, That’s gone, But we must treat our comrades with dignity, No one told us to do this, but we must do it, The easiest way would be to burn their bodies, but that won’t leave evidence of our suffering, Years from now, someone would dig up these graves and see how we lined up their heads and their feet with care, with arms on their sides, that we thought about honor the best way we knew how under the worst circumstances, Dignity will not die with them, Have them face up to the sky so their spirits could find their way out. And in English as if to pray, and from his trove of quotes, Tasio said, For that sleep in death, what dreams may come.
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End of Excerpt.
Synopsis:
Bataan New Jersey is an epic, multigenerational saga that spans a century and four countries, following the intertwined lives of four strong Filipino women and Queer individuals. The story begins in 2009, the year President Obama authorized reparation payments to WWII Filipino veterans. The sudden death of a family patriarch in Jersey City, New Jersey triggers a dual timeline: one thread moves forward to 2021, following the contemporary Filipino diaspora, while the other delves into the past, tracing the widow Lourdes’ maternal lineage to pre-WWII “Old Manila” and the 1921 U.S.-Muslim conflict, when her female ancestors defied conventions and forged their own paths in a war-torn Philippines.
As the family confronts their past and reshapes their future, their collective trauma echoes across generations, reflecting the struggles of marginalized voices both then and now. A bold reimagining of the Bataan narrative, Bataan New Jersey challenges conventional history, offering new perspectives on socio-political events—from the 1945 Battle of Manila and the
Marcos dictatorship of the 1970s to the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks and the ongoing American culture wars. The novel draws comparisons to the vast scope of Cutting for Stone and the multigenerational depth of Pachinko, bringing into sharp focus the profound impact of three successive wars—Spain, the U.S., and Japan—on the untold stories of Filipinos across time and borders.
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April has always been a solemn month for my family. April 9, 2025 is the 83rd anniversary of The Fall of Bataan. It remains to be the biggest military surrender in American history.
My late father was a WWII veteran and a survivor of a Japanese concentration camp and the Bataan Death March. While Bataan might already be lost in the historical memory of a new generation, World War II’s Fall of Bataan remains to be well-documented as the biggest American military surrender in history. While Bataan is the heart of the novel, BATAAN JERSEY deals with the aftermath of recurring wars and their impact on the lives of four generations of Filipino women, non-binaries, and Queers, whose experiences we rarely see in literary historical fiction. Members of this multigenerational saga offer alternative perspectives to what shapes history. And their untangling of generational secrets gives meaning to a theme running throughout their lives about the knots of time: What tied is tied.
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Toward the end of the pandemic, I went to a coffee shop every day for three years before starting my full-time work and wrote and edited Bataan New Jersey. I started in Jackson Heights, Queens, through our travels in Europe during the holidays, and completed it in our new home in Manhattan, close to the V.A. Hospital where my father passed in 2003. I chronicled my writing voyage on my Facebook page. I will be blogging about the process and other related WWII pieces on this newly-updated website.
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