If I were to go back to the Philippines, I would probably end up teaching creative writing at a university. I wouldn't be able to write, for I would become too jaded to be able to view the existing situation objectively.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I would love to be a travel writer. I'd be so stoked.
I studied in New York. I fell in love with an Australian-born, half-Filipina girl. So we moved to Australia when she went to her university and I moved with her. We moved to Montreal because she was going to take her year abroad, and I wanted to see if I could keep on writing there. It's really hard to make it as a writer in the Philippines.
I love teaching creative writing, and I think I'm good at it, but in a different life, I could have been teaching elementary school.
I opted for a freelance writing career. I was lucky enough to have the means to do it.
My writing has been shaped by the three countries - Sri Lanka, the Philippines and England - I have lived in.
In this day and age, you can write anywhere in the world. You can really live anywhere and have the same career.
You have to first be a writer and somebody who loves to write. If I couldn't travel, I would still write.
College education is the great Filipino dream. But in a world of rapid technological change, getting a job or keeping it depends as much on how well one reasons as how well one uses his hands.
I don't think I would be a writer if I had stayed in Chile. I would be trapped in the chores, in the family, in the person that people expected me to be.
Some of my educated Filipino friends were aspiring poets, but their aspirations were all in the direction of the United States. They had no desire to learn from the bardic tradition that continued in the barrios. Their ideal would have been to write something that would get them to Iowa, where they would study creative writing.