Fiction is a very powerful tool for teaching history. The Philippines was the first Iraq, the first Vietnam, the first Afghanistan, in the sense that it was the United States' initial or baptismal experience in nation-building.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
The Philippines was with the U.S. in the Second World War, in the Korean War, in the Vietnam War, and now in the war against terrorism.
My experience of fiction was, in the beginning, so exploratory. I wasn't sitting down to a desk at Yaddo with a month, thinking I have to have a draft of a novel.
The Philippines and the U.S. have had a strong relationship with each other for a very long time now. We have a shared history. We have shared values, democracy, freedom, and we have been in all the wars together in modern history, the World War, Second World War, Cold War, Vietnam, Korea, now the war on terrorism.
Even before 9/11, the Philippines was already fighting terrorism in southwestern Philippines. That's why when 9/11 happened, we could understand the pain.
Fiction is a particular kind of rhetoric, a way of thinking that I think can be useful in your life. It asks you to image the world through someone else's eyes, and it allows you to try to empathize with situations that you haven't actually experienced.
Fiction connects: past and present; the great and the small; the surface with the depths. Fiction brings out the innermost, invisible springs of life that cannot be revealed in factual narratives.
Fiction basically is a form of gossip where you want to enter other people's lives, the lives of people you don't know, and you want to know what's going to happen to them.
Most fiction comes from your experience.
Fiction is about intimacy with characters, events, places.
Fiction came quite a while later. I began with short stories and fiction for children.