Charlson Ong talks about Sojourner, Settler, Seer— the complete collection of his short stories.
What drove you to start writing short stories?
I write to tell stories. To figure out why people do certain things. Why I did certain things at some point in my life, for instance, “The Execution” is based on a boyhood memory when classes resumed after the declaration of Martial Law in 1972. Some of us kids were talking about the execution of Lim Seng that was shown on TV. I remember a classmate telling us how his father woke him up on the dawn of the execution and brought him to Fort Bonifacio to witness the event. It always confounded me why anyone would do that and I wrote the story many years later to try figuring it out.
Your first two collections were almost exclusively about Chinese-Filipinos while the last two only had a couple of Chinoy stories each. Why the shift?
I wrote of non-Chinese characters later because they are also a part of me, of my life, and after my novel Banyaga I felt I’d exhausted my Chinese tropes, told my epic saga, fashioned as it were the “uncreated conscience of the race”- or gave it a shot. I thought I’d keep my novels “Chinese” if I were to write any more and let the stories be eclectic.
How is your process in writing a short story different from your process in writing a novel?
For short stories, I tend to finish the first draft in one go and then return to them for rewrites. Novels have to be planned and at many junctures, I’ve had to force myself to soldier on. There is always the temptation to end it, take a shortcut. Stop.
Many of your stories have unexpected or ambiguous endings. How do you decide how to end a story?
I don’t plot out my stories thoroughly. I often play it by ear, allowing the subconscious material to play their part. They may twist and turn. I agree with Butch Dalisay that the “Knowing is in the Writing.” The writing process is the thinking process. You know intuitively when you’re done. In a sense, the spirit of the language takes you where you need to be.
How do you feel about seeing scenes from your stories represented in the art for this collection?
I like very much the illustrations in the book. Marius Black did a wonderful job.
Which characters or worlds in your stories would you most like to revisit to write another story on, or even a novel?
I considered turning “Mystic Marriage” into a novel, I might still.
What is your next book about?
When I started writing forty years ago, there was little representation of the Chinoy in art and media. I thought I should do something. Now, I think much ground has since been covered even in popular cinema. But there is a new dynamic created by the influx of new immigrants from China–some transient–who began arriving again in the 1980s after over 30 years. From largely labor migration in the past, now huge capital, some illicit and criminal, is being trafficked. There is an increasingly complex relationship among Chinese Filipinos, immigrants as well as the larger society. Then there is the growing geopolitical rivalry between China and the US wherein the PH is implicated. With China increasingly seen as imposing its interests and narrative upon the rest of the world, the Chinese-Filipino writer risks no longer being seen as representing a minority discourse but representing a hegemonic power. This is what faces us today and is the subject of my next novel.
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