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 impacted by 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 she can only imagine. 

 

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.