On This Gathering

In this guest editor's introduction, I must make two confessions.

The first confession, "Always Again," the title of this collection, began as a phrase I used in bitterness.

I'm Filipina American—an Italiapina, as my friends say—or Filipinx, in the ongoing lexicon of how we of the Philippine diaspora refer to ourselves. I came of age traveling back and forth between the United States and the Philippines, starting with a journey to Manila with my mother when I was twelve. I lived in Metro Manila as a teacher and a writer in my twenties and thirties, and now I travel from Los Angeles, one of the capitals of the Philippine American diaspora, to Metro Manila for month-long visits.

I have been fortunate to be of two countries and to have the material and temporal capacity to inhabit both. So it is not the healthiest urge, I realize, to begin with bitterness.

But "always again" is the reversal of that aspirational phrase, "never again." Never again to atrocity and dictatorship. Never again to the horrors leaders can visit upon a people.

I thought of the phrase "always again" when Rodrigo Roa Duterte won the 2016 elections. I stayed up all night on a friend's couch, wondering who would survive and who would die during Duterte's brutal regime.

After all the violence and impunity of that reign, I thought, "Always again," in the run-up to the 2022 elections in the Philippines, when journalist friends told me they observed a solid majority in favor of electing Ferdinand "Bong Bong" Marcos, Jr. When Bong Bong did win, beating out the human rights attorney candidate with no record of corruption, I thought the phrase again. Always again, the country's worst political families proceed like zombies, feeding on viral and social media lies and citizens' ennui. Again, the unrepentant family of the unrepentant plunderer—the original human rights violating diktador, Ferdinand Marcos, Sr.—runs the country.

Always again, typhoons return, stronger and faster, taking our most vulnerable peoples into their winds and waters. Cycles of classist and imperialist impunities repeat with the quiet rhythm of mundane evil. Immigration, with all its attendant loneliness and hardship, continues out of the archipelago; my own family departed for California in the late 1970s, during the horrors of the first Marcos regime.

And yet.

Always again, joy, community, and thriving take place alongside the natural and unnatural extremes of what the people of the Philippines suffer. In Manila, gardens grow in the harshest asphalted climates, shoots reaching brilliantly green from buckets, plastic bottles, and old shoes. Activists and the rarest of civic workers move into the breaches left by leaders who betray us, forming oases of resistance, healthy demands, and mutual care. Children find ways to play in every kind of street and waterway. The youth remind us, as our cover does, to look to the stars in great darkness. As much as suffering repeats, so does a powerful legacy of resistance.

Bitterness is the shortest, most incomplete story. No single narrative—like no single language—rules the Philippines or its diasporas. The islands and their climates form archipelagos of deep contradictions and shape a people of persistent laughter. There is no party like a Philippine party, no daily hangouts more epic than those that celebrate the everyday miracle of survival. Even with the sparsest ingredients, Filipinos will find a way to feast.

That's how I choose to see this collection: as a rich gathering. A reveling in what words and images can do to preserve, to resurrect, to celebrate, and to create, even in the most difficult conditions.

And here I must make my second confession. Always, again, I think of my friends who died.

I do so with great affection and unsolvable longing, my mind going to the ones with whom I'd most like to share what I have curated here. If we are lucky enough to age, I suppose it is our destiny to have our gaze go to that audience: to the ones who have gone before us to that place we all will eventually go.

Over my twenties and thirties, I gathered friends and mentors—or, I should say, friends and mentors gathered me. They shared with me, over the years, their deep knowledge of the Philippines. My teachers were Susan Quimpo, an author, educator, and activist against dictatorship; Gayia Gesite Beyer, an anthropologist and a guide to Banaue, in the mountainous north of the Philippines, her indigenous home; and Ged Hidalgo, a teacher of young children, a visual artist, and a musician who played indigenous instruments from many regions of the archipelago. The three of them did not live to see the end of the awful pandemic lockdown in the Philippines. But they live on in me, in so many other loved ones, and in the communities they reached. And so I dedicate this issue to them, and I offer it to you, too.

I hope the work that gathers here teaches readers well—as well as my friends and mentors taught me.