A new novel

I sent in a manuscript to a publisher today.  They'd expressed interest in the book (a short novel) based on the synopsis I'd emailed them.

Now to keep my fingers crossed and be prepared for rejection, or if the news is good, the possibility of revisions.  I've been writing a lot the past weeks —  emails, blog posts, private fiction — so further writing need not proceed from a cold start.

I can't say anything about the book right now other than to say it was written in the first half of 2022, before I was gripped by Il Vespaio fever. 

Also that in 2022 it felt like a book that I needed to get out of the way before I could indulge in the rest of my projects. 

The accompanying pastel drawing is of some limestone cliffs I photographed as we drove back from the Batu Caves to Kuala Lumpur in September 2022. I added the beach and the water. It is now a view of a tropical island, the world of my new novel.  

 © 2023 Lakambini Sitoy

My tough years in Denmark

I've gotten into an email conversation that means a lot to me, because it is with an actor in a movie from long ago, a movie which is one of my guilty pleasures to this day. 

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He 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 replied: 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 heart's 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 in Denmark 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.

*** 

I re-read what I'd written and wondered if I sounded angry. I hadn't meant to. Had I given away too much of myself? I don't think so. There is nothing here that I hadn't articulated to my friends (very often after a few sips of wine), and I do recall saying something very similar to this to the wife of a friend from way back (she a producer, he a filmmaker) when we met in Manila in 2022. With the few fellow writers and creatives that I've met in Europe, the sentiments are the same. Some have worse stories to tell.

The only difference is that I don't put this out on Facebook.  For many of us, Facebook is the place to curate the brighter side of life -- not that the life we put out on Facebook is a lie, but it's what we have after we've managed to cut away the unpleasantness (that all of us go through anyway). For some, Facebook is a place to bitch and trigger people. Not for me.

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I continued: 

I’ve been writing “fan fiction” for myself (Note: Over the 2022 holidays). 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’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 (A blog on the boys of Il Vespaio that I am slowly building) 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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Now that these thoughts have been put into words, they are less frightening. 

And it's somehow easier to proceed with writing about the immigration experience to Denmark. I don't mean to be disloyal -- I am a dual citizen after all. But it speaks of how deeply we "newcomers in Denmark"  have been conditioned to believe that we are eternal guests in this country and must behave and smile and say thanks, that more than 19 years after I first set foot here, after 15 years of marriage and of being a dutiful and law-abiding citizen, I still worry about being labelled ungrateful and -- being a second-class citizen -- unworthy of speaking out.

An Il Vespaio (Hornet's Nest, 1970) blog

I have a new project: a fan blog titled "The Boys of Il Vespaio", with a subtitle that mirrors this (I ragazzi del Hornet's Nest -- is that proper Italian?) I first saw Hornet’s Nest in 1980, in a packed movie theatre in a small city in the Philippines.  It was the second time the film had played in Dumaguete; the first, according to an uncle, was in 1971 or so, and it was so popular back then people lined up just to get in.  We had no idea of the film’s many names, nor that Il Vespaio was the name originally given it in Italian and used during the filming (a working title, if you like).

I had just turned eleven when we saw the film; we had returned from a year in the States and were already very Americanized, not surprising since we had grown up on the campus of Silliman University, which had been founded by American missionaries in 1901. We spoke English, read only English books, and loved a good war flick -- there were lots of them from 10 and 20 years back, playing in the theaters.

My older sister and I fell in love with Hornet’s Nest, and we remembered all the scenes and all the lines. Everyone we knew had seen the movie, and the boys’ theme (composed by Ennio Morricone) was whistled in school corridors for months after that.

My sister and I had a shared fantasy world, and so we spent the next couple of years drawing and writing stories about the Hornet’s Nest boys, making them interact with other characters in that universe.

Because we never got all their names (much less the names of the actors who played them), we had to invent. And invent we did. We gave them new names and complete personalities, and in the process collapsed one boy into another and made two or three out of what had been one. Memory and imagination mixed.

Then as we got older, she and I fell out, and the old school notebooks and folders of drawings were put away and lay untouched for nearly 40 years.

I was at my childhood home in August this year, and finally called up the courage to open, first my box, and then my sister’s, with a view to photographing everything before it all crumbled to bits. So, filled with nostalgia, and sadness that many of the best notebooks were missing (my fault!) and that my sister was no longer around to help me remember our stories, I decided to re-immerse myself in that world once again.

The boys in this movie are virtually nameless. Ironic, because the end credits present us with a screenful of names: Franco and Tonio, Arturo and Mikko and Romeo, Silvio and Umberto... and so forth. But because few of them are ever called by name as the film progresses, the audiences never get to know who is who. By the 1970s, it was standard to designate a minor movie character with some descriptive phrase: "Bossman's accomplice" "Juggler" "Class child." But not so with Hornet's Nest. No "Lookout Boy", "Demolition Boy no. 2", "Boy who had to pee in front of the sentry." 

The list of first names was elegant and tantalizing -- it indicated that somewhere there had been a master plan where each boy, perhaps, had a back story, maybe even a character arc. 

At the very least, I wanted to match faces with names. My sister and I had had a whale of a time re-inventing the 15 teenagers of Captain Turner's Baby Brigade, but something was missing. I'd tried twice before, in 1989, when I found a VHS tape of the movie and made some awful color sketches of the boys, taking notes (no luck there) and again in 2012, when I purchased the Michael Avallone based-on-the-screenplay novel off E-bay (still no luck -- the familiar lines had been shuffled around so that attributed to two or three boys were lines spoken by just one in the film).

What was missing was the actors. I've never been the kind of person to watch a film without simultaneously imagining the production behind it. Today, I sit in front of the TV with a finger hovering over my device, and it's a rare movie that can compete with the IMDB. My older sister was the same, and we'd always been that way, so when the 15 Italian boys lost their luster (somewhat) we went on to invent the world of the film production, with results that are too ridiculous to go on the internet. Two smartass girls, 11 and 14... what do you expect?

So I decided to use a combination of social media and movie databases to match names to faces and try to find out who everyone had been and (hopefully) how they had come to be in Il Vespaio. I’d recently done a portrait project where I’d had to compare photos of some people taken today with images of them from decades ago, and I figured I knew how to study a face and how it changes with the years. I wanted to write about them, and how important they had been for me as a child (or a young girl), how vital to the creative side of me. I decided I would not make it one of those awful "Where are they now?" features that both feed, and feed on, ageism. It was enough to know who they all had been. Details of how they'd come to be in the movie, and a hint or two of the trajectory of their lives since would be an extra reward.

Did I succeed? Yes. Did I contact them? Well, only one, as of this writing (but hit the jackpot!). Social media feelers for a couple more.

The new blog is in progress, and will be public soon.

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This post began as an email, which was sent on November 30  via web contact form to Dan Keller, who played Tekko. How I sweated over what to write him.  The resulting email conversation can be read on his website at: https://www.dan-keller.com/photos/1969-Vespaio/    I’m pleased  to say that as a consequence  of our exchange, Dan found more and more photos from his files and posted them on his Il Vespaio page. I’ve gotten his permission to share those photos on-line. The behind-the-scenes photo above is courtesy of Dan, and was taken by production photographer Claudio Patriarca.