Everything matters. Time is precious. |
Music is very influential to my writing, as are theater and film. |
I'm an underdog person, so I align myself with those who seem to be not considered valuable in polite society. |
Life is not simple, and people can't be boxed into being either heroes or villains. |
There were also horror shows on the radio. Very terrifying and thrilling to me as a kid. They had all these creepy sound effects. They would come on at ten o'clock at night, and I just would scare myself to death. |
Becoming a mother has helped make me a tougher, stronger writer. |
I don't believe in sampling some Tibetan music just to make it sound groovy, but you do your homework, you understand what you're doing with it. |
There are certain regions in the country where the indigenous people eat dogs. |
Growing up in the Philippines, I loved all kinds of movies. We had a very healthy film industry there when I was a child. It's now gotten very limited. They only make action movies and hard-core exploitation movies. Women get raped; men get shot. |
I love writing dialogue, and I think a lot of my writing is visual and very cinematic. |
But I think there's a genuine joy, too, a sense that no matter what, even if my stomach's growling, I'm going to dance. That's what I want to leave people with at the end of the play. After all this, people still know how to live. |
I also identify as a Latin person, a person who has Latin blood. |
We didn't have television until I was about eight years old, so it was either the movies or radio. A lot of radio drama. That was our television, you know. We had to use our imagination. So it was really those two things, and the comics, that I immersed myself in as a child. |
I'm preparing for a multimedia theater piece, Airport Music, that's coming up in New York City. |
My identity is linked to my grandmother, who's pure Filipino, as pure as you can probably get. And that shaped my imagination. So that's how I identify. |
I don't know what issues concerning identity have helped contemporary fiction evolve to what it is now. All I know is that the range of voices that are being heard and published is a lot more diverse than when I was coming up. |
I think for a lot of so-called post-colonial peoples, there's a feeling of not being quite legitimate, of not being pure enough. |
Hybridity keeps me from being rigid about most things. It has taught me to appreciate the contradictions in the world and in my life. I scavenge from the best. |