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Beyond The 'Sometimes Sentimental' Story Of Filipino Migrants

On potential misconceptions about Filipino workers

There's an over-arching sense of [overseas Filipino workers] as the heroes and saints of their families, who are making this huge sacrifice — which, of course, they are — of being apart from the people they love in order to support those same people. And I was curious about where some of these characters ... hew to that narrative and where they kind of go off script as well.

On unlikely friendships among migrants

When people are sort of thrown together in a place that's strange or foreign to them, Filipinos who maybe would not have socialized with each other back in Manila spend all their free time socializing with each other and kind of lean on each other and feel a responsibility to each other.

Book Reviews

Morally Messy Stories, Exquisitely Told, In Mia Alvar's 'In The Country'

Book Reviews

We're All Looking For A Home 'In The Country'

On writing in the second person

I think the second person is just polarizing for understandable reasons. People don't like being told that they are someone they're not, or that they're doing something that they definitely aren't. It can come across in ... almost an aggressive way.

And I sort of decided that I was OK, in this particular story, with aggressively insisting that the person reading identify with [the main character], whose real-life counterpart might not have time to read a literary short story collection.

I think the second person kind of speaks to the desire to have someone identify with this character, and also the impossibility of it.

Read an excerpt of In the Country

Philippines