domenica 9 maggio 2010

An Expatriate Filipino Writes of a Parallel Life

FROM NYTIMES
By JOYCE HOR-CHUNG LAU

HONG KONG — The story begins with the death of Crispin Salvador, an expatriate Filipino author living in New York, whose body is found floating in the Hudson River. He had been scathingly critical of his home country before his mysterious demise.
Miguel Syjuco's first novel, “Ilustrado,” written after he left the Philippines, won the Man Asian Literary Prize in 2008.
It is part of a novel, a satire of the chaos and violence of Philippine politics called “Ilustrado,” the first book by Miguel Syjuco, an expatriate Filipino author living in Montreal. And — if the book was not clear enough in its theme that art reflects life — the fictional narrator and Salvador’s protégé is also named Miguel Syjuco.

The real-life Mr. Syjuco, a dapper 33-year-old, has been promoting “Ilustrado,” which won the 2008 Man Asian Literary Prize, on a tour through the United States and Britain, where it will be released in coming months.

Sipping tea amid the wood paneling of the Hong Kong Foreign Correspondents Club — in a camel blazer with matching red pocket square and red cuff links — he looked the part of a gentleman from a good Philippine family. Mr. Syjuco, who once held entry-level jobs at The New Yorker and other magazines before deciding to devote himself full time to writing, is clearly from the educated upper classes that he skewers in his book.

“My family, my friends, my colleagues — we are the elites,” he said. “We are a wealthy, beautiful country, and we’ve screwed it up so badly. The majority of wealth is controlled by a minority. And we don’t know when enough is enough. The elite don’t want one mansion; they want three.”

Like his fictional counterpart in the book, Mr. Syjuco came from a political family but declined to enter the business himself.

His real-life father, Augusto Syjuco Jr., known as Boboy, stepped down from a cabinet post in the government of President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo to run for Congress in national elections on Monday. So far, nearly three dozen people have been killed in attacks linked to those elections. While Mr. Syjuco is disparaging of the violence, he says he is not overly worried about his father.

“He knows what he’s doing,” Mr. Syjuco said. “He’s with Gloria Arroyo — in her party. He is entrenched in his district, and he has his bodyguards. So he is more protected than candidates from grass-roots parties.”

Mr. Syjuco said he did not want to draw too close a comparison between his own life and the book, but the parallels — the fictional Miguel Syjuco, an orphan, disappoints his doting grandparents when he fails to live up to their political ambitions — are obvious.

“My dad wanted me to be a lawyer, a politician, the president of his country,” Mr. Syjuco said. “I have two sisters and three brothers, and not a politician among any of them. I was my dad’s great last hope.”

Mr. Syjuco was unheard of before “Ilustrado” won the Man Asian Literary Prize, which shares a sponsor with the Man Booker Prize and recognizes the best Asian novel written or translated into English. Outside of the Philippines, he could not even get short stories published in journals.

“I got rejected left and right,” he said. “I wallpapered my wall with rejection slips, the way F. Scott Fitzgerald was said to have done.”

In fact, when “Ilustrado” won the award, it was still an unedited draft with no publisher.

Understandably, Mr. Syjuco had almost no expectation of winning. “I just wanted to get on the long list so agents would pay attention to me,” he said.

“I remember sitting in front of my computer, waiting for midnight — since the long list would be announced at that moment — and hitting the refresh button over and over. I did the same thing when the short list was announced. When I flew out to Hong Kong for the awards dinner, I thought I’d just eat a lot of Chinese food and get drunk.”

Miguel Syjuco was born in the Philippines to a Chinese-Filipino father and a Spanish-Filipino mother, into a family whose wealth was anchored in a soft-drink bottling company.

His parents moved abroad during the Marcos era, and Mr. Syjuco spent much of his childhood in Vancouver, British Columbia. “The first thing I wrote was in grade five. I tried to write a sequel to ‘Lord of the Rings,’ ” he said.

He returned to the Philippines for high school and college and, as he says, “got onto the right path when I flunked out of economics in university.”

He and some friends put together Local Vibe, an entertainment Web site. But he could not free himself of family ties and expectations, so he decided to move back overseas.

He knocked around the United States, Canada and Australia, studying, writing and trying to stay financially afloat. He had entry-level jobs at The New Yorker, Esquire and The Paris Review, and earned a master’s degree in creative writing from Columbia University. He is finishing a Ph.D. at the University of Adelaide, in Australia.

“Ilustrado” starts off as a murder mystery. When Salvador dies, the draft of a politically biting masterpiece he had been working on disappears. The book then moves into what are, for the Philippines, complicated and interwoven issues of sex and poverty, migration and work, religion and governance.

Its short chapters come in a cacophony of fonts and voices. There are excerpts from the two main characters’ own writing, plus e-mail messages, newspaper articles, blog comments, flashbacks and dream sequences.

The style is postmodern (or, as some prefix-happy critics call it, post-postmodern) right down to the faux footnotes. The novel is short, sharp and funny, though some critics have called it overwritten. (“Yet it was the internecine intensities of the local literati that gossiped Salvador’s life into chimerical proportions.”)

“I don’t particularly like the postmodern tag,” Mr. Syjuco said. “It’s a novel of today, a contemporary novel. The way we consume information is fragmented.”

Mr. Syjuco explained that “Ilustrado,” which means “enlightened” in Spanish, refers to a period in the late 1800s when the Philippines was a Spanish colony and Filipinos traveled to Europe to be educated in the arts, sciences and politics.

“These young men, the ‘enlightened,’ returned home to aid in the 1896 revolution that ousted Spanish control,” Mr. Syjuco said. “There are 8.1 million Filipinos abroad now. They have the potential to be the new ‘ilustrado’ class. But of those 8.1 million, only 500,000 are registered to vote in the upcoming elections. Maybe they have turned their back on the democratic process.”

Mr. Syjuco, who has already sold a second book to a North American publisher, identifies himself as a Filipino author but says that overseas life gave him the distance needed to see his country’s problems.

“I don’t know if I could have written this if I had stayed in the Philippines,” he said.

He declined to predict what would happen in the coming elections.

“My book asks some tough questions, but it’s not the Great Philippine Novel,” he said. “I’m 33. I don’t have all the answers. If I did, I’d be running for president.”

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