A Year in Reading: Gina Apostol
When the pandemic began I worked fiercely on finishing a novel I had started but dropped a few years ago—because that’s what I do under stress: I buckle down and write. It’s how I cope. Work is my pleasure and my lifeline. So mostly what I read at the beginning of the year were odd books on the first years of American occupation of the Philippines, 1899 to 1905 or so—one of the time-spans in my novel. I read a book called about the 1903 group of pensionados, Filipinos sent on scholarship to the States before the Philippine-American War was even over. This early education of Filipinos who became collaborators with the American regime was part of U.S. war strategy against the bourgeois complicity with horror has been one of my work’s themes. I also read a book about the Lopez sisters of Balayan, early activists who organized the Association of Filipino Feminists in 1905. I read the entire catalog of Filipino agrarian goods, telescopic machines, animals, and displayed humans in
