6Lambda Book ReportJune • July 2005

Features

i n t e r v i e w

an Ong’s newest novel,

The Disinherited

, is a 2004Lambda Literary Award finalist in the Gay Men’s fiction cat-egory. His first novel,

Fixer Chao

, was a scathing satireabout a con artist who infiltrates New York society. Ong was award-ed a MacArthur grant in 1997 for playwrighting; he was one of the youngest ever awardees. Currently, Ong is resident playwright for2005 at Ma-Yi Theater Company; Ma-Yi has produced Ong’s plays

Middle Finger

(in 2000) and

Watcher

(in 2001). Check out www.ma-yitheatre.org for more information.

Tom Cardamone:

Both of your books [

Fixer Chao

and

The Disinherited

] have this economic span, people from one end of the spectrum looking at people from the other, but neither book is polemic. Why does this interest you, and drive your fiction?

Han Ong:

I guess a writer is a fluid creature. He is working class,sometimes below that, but he might be taken up by the wealthy or find himself invited to their homes. Or he is invited to speak at events, and who should be the funders and underwriters of such things but theupper class, for whombook-reading (likeopera-going) is a markerof distinction, of a certain refinement (read: money)? A writerstraddles both up and down. And it seemed natural that I should want to include or, at the very least, broach that in my writing.

TC:

I described your books to a friend as “gay-but-not-gay.” Iguess I meant that neither novel is the typical “coming out” story,or even focused on homosexuality. And though sexuality seemsboth uniquely peripheral and integral to

The Disinherited

, it’s notstrictly a gay novel. Am I right here?

HO:

Absolutely.

TC:

So do you think gay fiction in general isn’t meeting someneeds of the reader—maybe it’s not broad enough?

HO:

Honestly, I don’t have any criticism about gay fiction, nega-tive or positive. I like the salacious and the serious in equal meas-ure. Coming out stories are not my cup of tea because in life, asin art, I’m not attracted to ingénues.

TC:

I heard an NPR interview about

Fixer Chao

where you dis-cussed hanging out with hustlers while growing up in Los Angeles—

Fixer

’s protagonist is a former hustler. One of the cen-tral characters in

The Disinherited

is a boy prostitute. There areissues of survival here, but also life-defining choices, or a lack thereof. What’s your maininterest in choosing to telltheir stories?

HO:

I was raised a Catholic. And the main legacy of a Catholic upbringing is the cen-trality of sex. Sex is THE FORBIDDEN. I believe that if you makesomething forbidden to a child, it will forever be a tenant in hisor her imagination. But also, prostitution is at the intersection of all the things I’m interested in: besides sex, there is money, class,

Author, playwrightand MacArthur “genius grant” winner,

Han Ong

intersects with

Tom Cardamone

H a n O n g p h o t o c r e d i t © J e f f r e y W . C h i e d o

Heroic Recall:

Han Ong’s Homecoming

“Coming out stories are not my cup of tea because in life,as in art, I’m not attracted to ingénues.”

power. Also, again, prostitution, like writing, exposes somebody from one class to a class he or she might otherwise not have beenexposed to. It’s a perfect vessel in which to embed a dialogueabout the up world and the down world. But I also find prostitu-tion—in my typically perverse, lapsed-Catholic way—heroic. I think these people are incredibly brave. Incredibly scary and incredibly brave.

TC:

The Disinherited

you capture a very stark, an almost mag-ical-realist view of the Philippines, and family as well. Was there a “homecoming” involved in the book, a physical return? Or do yougo back to the Philippines often, never? I guess I’m interested in what “back” or “return” means to you, and in the context of thisnovel in particular.

HO:

I haven’t gone back to the Philippines since coming here in1984, at the age of 16. So, for me, writing the book was my ver-sion of a “homecoming”—part heroic (even if I do say so myself)recall and part interviewing and hanging out with friends who’vegone back is how I got the details.

TC:

When I first heard about

The Disinherited

I immediately thought of Kurt Vonnegut’s

God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

. I’dlike to know what your literary influences for this book, or really,for life in general, are. What are you reading now?

HO:

I’ve never read Mr. Vonnegut, I’m afraid. I was thinking morealong the lines of

Under the Volcano

—a straight white (sort-of)man who goes to the Third World and has a kind of nervousbreakdown. My favorite book of last year was

Little Children

by Tom Perotta. I’m currently reading Tama Janowitz’s latest novel,

Peyton Amberg

. She’s a fantastic writer, even if the book isspoiled by Ms. Janowitz being determinedly downbeat. I like writ-ers like Tama Janowitz; that is to say, writers who have beenpassed by, or undervalued, because the culture has had their way with them and no longer has any use for them. I think the culture,as a whole, is largely stupid—even the highbrow culture—so if they pass something by, there must be tremendous value in it.

TC:

There are references to film in both books, more strongly in

The Disinherited

, and movie metaphors crop up throughout. I’vethought of film as a pretty undocumented influence on writing forawhile now; for good or ill, I think both popular and more exper-imental authors are taking more and more of their cues from film.I read your piece in the 27th Asian American Film FestivalProgram. If I recall correctly, you’re something of a cinephile. I’dlike to know your thoughts on cinema as a literary influence.

HO:

I’m not sure about literary influence, but I just love themovies. And I think part of writing is to include the things that you love in your work, right? Also, literary influences: PaulineKael, the great film critic. My favorite film director is the Japanesegreat Yasujiro Ozu—though

Tokyo Story

, supposedly his “best” work, is far from my favorite. Like I said, most critics are dun-derheads.

TOM CARDAMONE

, 35, lives in New York City, harbors a skullfullof novels and recently launched his web site, www.pumpkinteeth.net.

Guide toDivestment

Reviewed by TomCardamone

The Disinherited

By Han OngFarrar, Straus and GirouxISBN 0-374-28075-4HB, $25.00, 369 pp.

he Disinherited

opens with a long, humid funeral procession. The rest of the book slowly reverses course but not tone; asthe patriarch of a Filipino family diminished in wealth andstature is laid to rest, much of the family’s callowness, their incestu-ous social cannibalism, is unearthed. And these aren’t pretty bones. This book, the smarter cousin to Han Ong’s first novel, thechoice satire

Fixer Chao

, is a novel of premature penance.

Fixer Chao

was enjoyable primarily for its evisceration of Manhattan A-lis-ters, but where his first book skewered, the second excavates. With

The Disinherited

Han Ong thankfully bypasses typical second novelpratfalls by simply going wider and deeper, applying a strong senseof syntax and psychological wit toward a nuevo-Gothic tale, replete with a mother enshrined in a madhouse, giving us a Filipino Addams Family that eschews snapping for class-conscious chinos.Seriously; this is one scary family.Roger Caracera, the youngest child-rebel son, crushed by the soul-numbing conformity demanded from his family, has escaped to a listless life in America. Now in his forties, he is recalled to bury hisfather. The character of Roger is fully realized, warts and all. In fact,special attention is paid to the warts—escape doesn’t mean ascen-sion. A failed writer-turned-writing instructor, he’s pretty much a mildly reformed (read: tired) hedonist who favors telling an easy lieover the complicated truth; horrified by the taint of a surprise inheri-tance that’s meant to rekindle his link to the family, he does every-thing he can to quickly pull off this monetary shroud before it settlesto recast him in the likeness of his despised father.He wants to get rid of the money fast, much to the horror of hisconniving and suspicious family, by distributing it among workersassociated with the family’s sugar plantations. Sugar, an all too fitting saccharine metaphor; all that is white is sweet and nourishing –thebook’s meditations on colonialism and race are apt and broad. Theauthor is not pointing fingers but performing autopsies, meaning noone is safe; there is no easy divide between criminal culture andnative victim. Australian pedophiles are treated to the same knife asthe Filipino culture that readily cashes their American Express travel-er’s checks. Much of the book’s success lies in the problematic situations thatarise with this attempted redistribution of wealth. Roger flounders with the money. Possible recipients balk. Eventually, he splits histime championing a begrudged, fledging tennis star while attempting to reform Blueboy, a child prostitute. Personally, I’m ready forauthors working within the genre(s) of gay fiction to retire hustlers

Featuresinterview

June • July 2005Lambda Book Report 7

8Lambda Book ReportJune • July 2005

Features

essay

as a stock character, but fortunately this is not the problem it couldhave been in

The Disinherited

. In Ong’s first novel,

Fixer Chao

,the protagonist is a hustler whose “hustle” graduates, hilariously,from turning tricks in Port Authority bathrooms to scamming thechic with faux-feng shui chicanery.Roger Caracera wants to remunerate Blueboy, past paramour tohis dead uncle, the former bastion of the family shame (until Rogercame along, that is). Han Ong wisely invests Blueboy with a seriousamount of adolescent histrionics, exacerbated here to the highestpitch due his sexual past. Gay literature often shows sex workers asleft cold, numb from their experiences—a bland “physically availableto all, emotionally available to none” theme has been worked todeath, equaling a big yawn for all. But Blueboy is volcanic. He is init for love, and love is as big as America. Love is just across theocean. A big, buff Christopher Reeves-Superman-type—or maybeClark Gable—just needs to fly over and swoop him up. This is how Blueboy initially sees Roger Caracera, as a Clark Gable look-alike who will totally and utterly Give-A-Damn. The only problem is hissavior is straight and more than a bit appalled by his diminutive suit-or.

The Disinherited

is a well-crafted, unique novel; all conventionsare pushed aside to allow the reader a walk down real-world streetsand interior alleyways normally forgotten or ignored. And the very title promises a story of divestment, but can someone successfully shed their origins, assuage a most ephemeral guilt? A harsh question,one answered by a very honest book.

TOM CARDAMONE

, 35, lives in New York City, harbors a skullfullof novels and recently launched his web site, www.pumpkinteeth.net.

Revelations andRevolutions: QueerFilipino Literature

By Patricia Justine Tumang

ueer Filipino writers, once an anomaly in the publishing industry in the United States, have recently been getting noticed. Published last year, Han Ong’s new novel,

The Disinherited

, has been receiving excellent reviews and is nominatedfor a Lambda Literary Award. Rick Barot, author of the poetry book

The Darker Fall

(2002) and recipient of a National Endowment forthe Arts grant, received the Katherine A. Morton Prize. Noël Alumit’s masterfully written debut,

Letters to Montgomery Clift

,received an American Library Association Stonewall Award forLiterature and a Global Filipino Literary Award for Fiction in 2003. Joël Barraquiel Tan won the Spoon River Poetry Review’s Editors’Prize for his poem “Manila Zoo,” from his forthcoming poetry book

Type O Negative

.Despite recent attention, we’ve been around for some time. Forover two decades, queerFilipino writers living in theUnited States have writtenabout issues that impact ourcommunities: HIV/AIDS,immigration, family, relation-ships, visibility, sexual revelry,colonization and the com-plexities of language. The late 1980s was a period when queer Filipino writers burst into the LGBT literary scene, mostnotably with Chea Villanueva. Villanueva’s first novel

Girlfriends

(1987) and its sequel

The China Girls

(1991) captured the eroticessence of street-smart, savvy butches and racially diverse lesbian rela-tionships. Unfortunately the novels, like Villanueva’s poetry book

The things I never told you: love poems

(1987), are out of print. Villanueva’s later books,

Jessie’s Song and Other Stories

and

Bulletproof Butches

, continue to break boundaries and address theglamour and grittiness of working-class lesbian life. Villanueva’s hon-est and gutsy prose offers a compelling glimpse of Filipina butchidentity and expression. The Philippine diaspora spans far and wide. Toronto-based writerNice Rodriguez’s short story collection

Throw it to the River

(1994) is an uncompromising series of vignettes that exploresFilipina lesbian life in Canada and the Philippines. Written with a keen eye for language, Rodriguez’s prose sparkles with rich imagina-tion and storytelling. R. Zamora Linmark, who was born in Manila,educated in Hawaii and now lives in California, locates his novel

Rolling the R’s

(1997) in Kalihi, Hawaii. Inspired by pop icons likeFarrah Fawcett and Scott Baio,

Rolling the R’s

is a raunchy exposi-tion that blends camp, pidgin language and gay sexuality into anamiable and fun-loving mix of Filipino Catholic superstition andrebellious gay youth. Whether set in Philippines, the United States or elsewhere, onekey aspect in many queer Filipino writers’ work is the centrality of a queer character. In Bino Realuyo’s novel

The Umbrella Country

(1999), 11-year-old protagonist Gringo learns to navigate his troubledchildhood on the streets of 1970s Manila. He is protective of hisolder brother Pipo, who likes to cross-dress and stage “MissUnibers” beauty contests. Writing Filipino gay characters is impor-tant to Realuyo. He says, “Literature is an act of political activismfor me. I want readers to see the complexity of gay life beyond one-dimensional portrayals. My next book,

The F.L.I.P. Show

, is teem-ing with gay characters, all Filipino-Americans.”Noël Alumit’s novel

Letters to Montgomery Clift

(2002) alsoexplores Filipino gay sexuality in childhood. Writing letters to hisidol, screen legend Montgomery Clift, Bong Bong Luwad recountslife in America, where he was sent by his parents to escape the Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines.Gay sexual discovery is a provocative subject that many queerFilipino writers embrace. Joël Barraquiel Tan and Ricardo Ramoshave a reputation for writing about titillating sexual experiences. Tan, editor of

Queer P.A.P.I. Porn

(1998) and

Best Gay Asian Erotica

(2004) and author of

Monster

(2002), revels in all the com-plexities of gay sexuality: locker room jaunts, hop-hop porn and sub- versive desire. Ramos’ novel

Flipping

(1998) is an action-packed sex-

Bino Realuyo