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On 1/6/2023 4:50 PM, Bing Sitoy wrote:
Hi Dan,
This email is a bit long and has lived a few days in my head.
You wrote: You write compellingly of the experience of the Ukrainian immigrants you teach. Was that also your own experience when you moved from the Philippines to Denmark?
I don’t know where to begin. The move from the Philippines to Denmark was …complicated, and was carried out over several years, as I travelled back and forth between both countries, trying to figure out whether I wanted to be married to a Dane or not. In the beginning there was the usual euphoria of being in a new place – the romance of perfect Scandinavia. (Incidentally, the first European country I ever visited, in 2001, was Finland, and it was then that I fell in love with the whole Nordic shebang)
I was free and independent. Then came the realization that, with the move to Denmark, I had lost everything. Friends, network, career, a job, all my languages. Unless they are lucky enough to have found employment in a Danish company (in which case they can speak English to their hearts’ content) new immigrants must go through public Danish-language education, and it’s here that the breaking-in, or breaking-down, begins. My situation was complicated in that I was here on account of marriage (so the permanent resident requirements were harder to meet), and I am a youthful-looking Asian woman. So in 2008 I went from being journalist with a career and "one of the best Filipina writers of her generation" to being the Asian wife of an older man, categorized alongside "mail order bride," "au pair" and "Bangkok prostitute." I was the Asian woman no one would talk to at parties because maybe she didn’t even understand what was going on and it wasn’t worth the effort spelling things out to her.
In time I learned to manipulate that "youthful-looking Asian woman" thing – but it was haaard.
You wrote: As a nurse, I am especially conscious of Filipina immigrants who have been so many of my colleagues. The Philippines produces a lot of nurses.
The Filipina nurses in the United States have a different trajectory of migration. Theirs is more acceptable. Becoming a nurse and "earning dollars" has been ingrained in Philippine culture for at least two generations. Seven of my first cousins are nurses, as were two aunts and countless high school friends and family friends. My best friend in high school is a nurse in the US (she was born there and has always been a Filipino-American) -- she’s retiring now, whereas I’ve just started rebuilding my career as a writer.
My parents were teachers at Silliman University, which is said to have the best College of Nursing in the entire Philippines. In the 1980s, the dean of this institution was our next-door neighbor on the Silliman campus. Expectations were high for me. Nursing was, and certainly still is, a respected career choice for a young woman (or a young man). Whole families go to nursing school. The people who become nurses are not the extremely poor who are in desperate need of American currency (after all, good nursing schools are privately-run and expensive). They’re middle class, and sometimes the children of nurses as well, and they are certainly one of the most affluent groups of people in the Philippines today. The city of Dumaguete where I grew up is now one of the more expensive cities in the Philippines (comparatively) partly because its residents trained to be nurses at Silliman, worked in the States, built nice houses, started their own businesses and continue to send money home.
When I was in the UK in 2003 (on a writing fellowship), I met a few Filipino nurses in Norwich. They were annoyed because UK rules set a cap on the number of hours they could work in a week. Those contemporaries of theirs who were "lucky" (their word) to have found employment in the United States could have a five-day workweek at one hospital, then move on the weekends at a different hospital, and even complete evening shifts. They were young and were willing to work their bodies to the bone. The British-based nurses felt they were cooling their heels, wasted.
You wrote: You mention a "based-on-screenplay book". What is that? Someone wrote a book that tells the movie's story? Is it any good?
The author is Michael Avallone. He writes in a Jack Higgins/Alistair McClean style, sort of. War adventure novel potboiler style. The book is copyright 1970 and was probably timed to be released alongside the film, or even before it. It was clearly written from an earlier iteration of the screenplay, maybe back when it was called “Children at their Games” and making the rounds of Hollywood studios.
I’m kind of on the fence as to whether the book is good or not. As a writer, I respect what Avallone was able to do with just the screenplay (knowing full-well the product would probably be very different from the movie) and working within the genre.
As a movie tie-in, well... I don’t get a feel for the boys and the dynamic that we see in the final movie. As a stand-alone book it’s okay, might serve as a diversion on a long train ride. It's told from Turner's perspective. The boys are much younger than in the film (ranging in age from 8 to 14). They sometimes do cute, precious things.
Tekko is a big role, with lines that eventually went to other boys. He's like the super-soldier in a platoon who is in everything. He gets special mention in the would-be rape. He gets to redeem the boys the following morning by claiming that they wouldn’t have gone through with it (that line went to Dempsey!). He is a strawberry-distractor, an avid listener to Aldo's prostitute tale, the truck driver and a demolition swimmer. He's that soldier who never gets killed. All that, and he's not even 13.
I'll see if I can send you scans of a few pages.
You wrote: You snuck in a zinger... You're writing "fan fiction"? A book? Somehow derived from this movie thing we've been discussing? The boggling doesn't cease!
Indeed, I’m writing “fan fiction”, though only in the sense that it’s about characters I didn’t originally create, crossed with characters my sister and I did create. I don’t plan to publish any of it. There are probably hundreds of thousands of stories in the Fan Fiction genre out on the internet by now, on apps dedicated to that purpose. Some of it is bad, and some X-rated. I never read the stuff, though.
No, I’ve been writing the "fan fiction" for myself. For the pure enjoyment of it. And certainly for the practice … when I haven’t written in a long time the words don’t flow as they should, and the writing becomes self-conscious. It helps me in my writing practice because I don’t have to worry about creating new characters nor scenarios (since these are alternate perspectives on earlier ones I created) and enables me to focus on the act, the art and the pleasure of putting my fantasies into words.
I wrote 18,000 words over the holidays. Hooray!
There’s another kind of fan writing I've been doing, though, and that's a blog. It’s called The Boys of Il Vespaio and it focuses on the 15 boys from that movie. How do you say the mirror version of that – is it "I ragazzi di Hornet’s Nest?" At present the blog is not yet public, but it exists in rudimentary form. The blog format is easier for me than a website, though the latter would probably have a higher likelihood of being read. Apart from posts identifying each boy, I’m thinking of short essays about various aspects of the movie.
I’ve been trying to write a book about the experience of migrating to Denmark for years and years. Most often a certain anger boils up and I have to put the task away. By practicing the craft of writing I hope to find the right balance between passion and distance. At some point in 2023, I'll put aside the blog and find my way back to this book. I wrote a short novel for young people early in 2022, so I've gotten some recent practice already.
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Here's a wee bit about Carlo from the fan fiction. "Tekko" is called Paolo in my file, because it’s the name I knew him as. The narrator is the minor character, female:
"So Carlo and Tekko fell out over a girl and stopped sharing a dormitory room. For a time, Carlo slept wherever he happened to be hanging out when curfew sounded. After all he didn’t have any personal possessions to his name.
Or perhaps he slept alone, because no one wanted him. He was a strange kid – because of his angelic looks you tended to think he was harmless. But he had been to the other side and back, and for this reason he spooked the boys, though they did their best to hide it. He’d been intense and eager to grow up and copy what the older ones were doing, and they'd tolerated him, but now every time he said some weird thing or looked at them in a particularly hard way, Mino and Lorenzo and Giorgio would avert their gaze. They never crossed themselves, but they would do that particular Italian gesture with the fingers, discreetly so as not to draw attention to their fear. Warding off the evil eye."
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Poor Carlo. He hasn’t been spared, either. I guess I should stop for now. Thank you for being my patient audience. (Oh, could you share some more of the backstories of the boys you remember?)
I’ve been stepping further into your website and have found the Oakland Riviera, among others. What an incredible life you have. What projects! What memories! Now I’m the voyeur.
Best regards,
Bing <3
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