I am excited to share that two essays by my late father, Francis C. Macansantos, are now available online. The first essay, "Nashville", written in 2012, chronicles my father's grapplings with the American Dream and America's legacy of colonialism in the Philippines and elsewhere when he and my mother lived in Nashville, Tennessee for five months in 2012. It was published in the Shanghai Literary Review's third issue (2018) and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize that same year, and after being available only in print, it has finally been made available online. You can read the essay for free here.
The second essay, "My Trilingual Career", is a speech he delivered at the Cordillera Writers Workshop in which he spoke about his journey as a writer from Zamboanga who began writing in his second language, English, and transitioned to writing in Chabacano, his first language, later in life. He talks about the difficulties of writing in Chabacano, which hardly has a literary tradition, and he also touches upon his struggles to learn Tagalog at an early age while "being ostracized in class by the arrogance of Tagalog teachers and classmates who made the rest of us feel like second-class citizens." I would like to thank Katitikan, a literary journal of the Philippine South, for helping us release my father's essay into the world, and for also asking my mother to write an introduction to my father's life and world. You can read the full essay here.
The second essay, "My Trilingual Career", is a speech he delivered at the Cordillera Writers Workshop in which he spoke about his journey as a writer from Zamboanga who began writing in his second language, English, and transitioned to writing in Chabacano, his first language, later in life. He talks about the difficulties of writing in Chabacano, which hardly has a literary tradition, and he also touches upon his struggles to learn Tagalog at an early age while "being ostracized in class by the arrogance of Tagalog teachers and classmates who made the rest of us feel like second-class citizens." I would like to thank Katitikan, a literary journal of the Philippine South, for helping us release my father's essay into the world, and for also asking my mother to write an introduction to my father's life and world. You can read the full essay here.
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