Of course, it's not an easy thing, right, because everyone has a different experience.Īt my end it's kind of a matter of doing the research and trying to get the facts right. And so I care about getting it right and I care about kind of representing things as accurately as I can. Like I said, my intended audience is Filipino Americans, but then also Filipinos. I think it becomes especially poignant when it's a community that you care about deeply.
That's a risk you take as a writer anytime you write something. On whether he feels qualified to write Filipino characters And so I kind of had this moment where I was like, "Well, what right do I have to speak on this topic kind of as an outsider? As somebody who hasn't lived in the Philippines since I was a baby?"
And so my initial reaction is that this is just a glaring human rights abuse, but it was kind of striking to me that most of my Filipino family - as well as, if you are to believe surveys - most Filipinos supported the drug war. On why he chose to write fiction about a very real war on drugsĪs a Filipino American I'm always kind of keeping an eye on the news of what's happening in the Philippines. "You can call people, you go back and visit every now and then, but it's not the same as living there." "Once you leave you have a different set of experiences and it's just a completely different realm," he says. Some estimates by rights groups and opposing politicians say more than 20,000 have been killed, while the official statistics released by the Philippine police are much more conservative.Īs the bodies of mainly poor people and low-level drug pushers pile up in the morgues and in the Philippine jails, the effectiveness of the crusade has been hotly debated (though Duterte remains popular.) It's a conversation that extends past shores of the Southeast Asian archipelago and extends to Filipinos, their families and descendants living abroad - including in the United States. Launched by President Rodrigo Duterte almost immediately after he was sworn into office in June 2016, the campaign has been heavily criticized for what human rights groups call extrajudicial killings. Ribay explores these complex feelings through the lens of the bloody war on drugs that's been raging in the Philippines for the last three years. "The difficulty with a dual identity is just trying to figure out what does it mean to be more than one thing in a world where people want you to be one thing," he says.
And not just Filipino Americans, Ribay tells NPR's Morning Edition, but also anyone else who would consider themselves more than one thing. Young adult author Randy Ribay is Filipino American and says his latest book Patron Saints Of Nothing is dedicated to people like him: "The Hyphenated," he calls them.
Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title Patron Saints of Nothing Author Randy Ribay
0 kommentar(er)
