Interview of Cecilia Manguerra Brainard by Takuya Matsuda
Focusing on her novel, When the Rainbow Goddess Wept
Takuya Matsuda is a PhD Candidate, Teaching Fellow
at the English Department of the University of North Texas
This Interview was done in March 2020 by email
TM (Takuya Matsuda): My name is Tak Matsuda, and I’m a PhD candidate in English at the University of North Texas. I’m from Japan and working on my dissertation that discusses ethnic American writers’ literary writings on the Second World War in the Pacific. I read your novel, When the Rainbow Goddess Wept, and was impressed with your portrait of the war and the history of the Philippines in the novel.
I’m writing this because I felt curious that you seemed to use the term of “Filipinos in America,” instead of “Filipino/a Americans,” in several occasions. In one interview, you said, “Many are still bickering about who the true Filipino American is. At some point, some said only those born in the US were the real Filipino Americans. Of course the immigrants ignore this definition.” I wonder if, when you said this, you had in mind the history of US colonization of the Philippines and the post-WWII neocolonial presence of the US in the Philippines. I think that many other Asian immigrants and their descents in the US, say Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans, accept the terms of "Chinese/Japanese/Korean Americans,” as categories determined by nationality. But this is so perhaps because their experience is very different from Filipinos’/as’ experience both at home and in the US.
I would be tremendously grateful if you could elaborate on your remark in the above interview. Again, thank you for writing the great WWII novel.
