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.
Covenant of Water (Abraham Verghese) meets Pachinko (Min Jin Lee) in BATAAN NEW JERSEY, a novel spanning 100 hundred years from 1921 to 2021 with a contemporary twist—four Queer generations of a Filipino family who reshaped history to carve their own place in the aftermath of successive wars inflicted by Spain, the U.S. and Japan on Philippine soil, especially by the most harrowing episodes of World War II: the Fall of Bataan in 1942 and the 65-mile Bataan Death March that killed 10,000 men in a few days.
The novel opens with Lourdes, a Filipino immigrant mother of mysterious ancestry, and with a line that resonates throughout the novel, “Lourdes, sixty-four-year-old strong, was born to battle.” We meet the Rosas family in Jersey City in 2009, the year Obama signed the Filipino Veterans Equity Compensation Act which compensated Filipino veterans who were denied war benefits after WWII. A death at the end of the chapter splits the timeline and spirals the succeeding chapters forward to 2021 and backward to 1921, like crisscrossing knots, sprawling their stories in multiple countries and languages, with past and recent sociopolitical events as backdrops, and through a Queer-normative lens and first-person narratives by strong Filipino women who shaped war and history on their terms. One hundred years of beleaguered Filipino, Spanish, American, and Japanese relations ultimately connect Lourdes with female ancestors she has never known, and whose personal choices about love and war created ripples through generations.
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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