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 a sweeping, multigenerational family saga spanning a century, from 1921 to 2021, across four generations, multiple countries, and languages. This episodic novel connects the roots of the Filipino American diaspora to three consecutive colonial invasions in the Philippines, as experienced by a matrilineal line of resilient Filipino women and queers, each making impossible choices through 100 years of global turmoil and generational secrets.
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The novel opens with Lourdes, a mestiza Filipino woman of mysterious ancestry, and a resonant line: “Lourdes, sixty-four years strong, was born to battle.” We meet the diasporic Rosas family in Jersey City in 2009, the year Lourdes’ husband, Efren Rosas, a Bataan Death March survivor and the family patriarch, dies, just as President Obama authorizes reparations for Filipino WWII veterans. Efren’s death fractures the Rosas family and sets two parallel timelines into motion. One moves forward to 2021, following the children, Irma, Ray, and Ben, as they navigate and offer new insights on immigration, Asian American activism, 9/11, the COVID-19 pandemic, and ongoing cultural battles around gender and identity. The other moves backward to 1921, tracing Lourdes’ matrilineal line through the brutal years of Martial Law, the Japanese occupation, and ultimately to Muslim Mindanao, where her ancestral legacy resurfaces amid the violence and displacement wrought by U.S. colonial rule in the Philippines.
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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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