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I am attracted to characters who are caught between worlds—people navigating different identities and disparate realities in search of their place under the sky.
Perhaps it was because I had spent my childhood and young adult years in the Philippines, a country whose colonial history had been described as “300 years in a Spanish convent and 50 years in Hollywood.” We spoke a mix of Tagalog and American English at home, in a house littered with Time magazines and the popular serialized graphic novellas sent to us for free because my father was an official at the postal department. Novels by Leon Uris, James Clavell, and James Michener occupied the bookshelves, alongside the well-thumbed set of encyclopedias. I went to private schools where nuns and priests strongly encouraged us to speak English, even during recess. Some students struggled with this rule. I, however, eagerly absorbed the English language because it was modern and dynamic, unlike the Spanish-inflected Tagalog vernacular. My Gen X cohorts and I eagerly embraced the language and the Westernized ethos that underpinned it.
After university, we worked in the skyscrapers of the financial district—ambitious, English-speaking yuppies in sharp-shouldered suits sitting in meetings with international executives. We aspired for foreign postings and dreamed of becoming hotshots in Madison Avenue. Yet, it was not unheard of for one of these yuppies to carry on a devotion to the Virgin Mary or spend their lunch break reading tarot cards for an officemate in search of love or fortune. The Philippines was nothing if not a collision of worlds.
In my late 20s, I bid farewell to that beautiful collision and moved to Canada. A new chapter, with a familiar theme.
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The Griffin and Sabine series, by Nick Bantock
The first book came out when Canada, for me, was just a postmark on my big brother’s letters, a distant beacon of the West. I was captivated by the idea of soulmates and by the richly illustrated letters and postcards that showed their journey—across the world, across dimensions, and into themselves in search of each other. I can identify with Griffin Moss, the graphic artist who is caught between realities. Increasingly distant from his busy but lonely world in London, he is drawn to the mysterious world that opens to him through Sabine Strohem’s postcards from the fictional Sicmon Islands.
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The English Patient, by Michael Ondaatje
I discovered the novel through the film after I became a resident of Canada. Ever the romantic, I cherished the idea of a love that transcended even death. But it was the character of Almásy that stayed with me. Burned beyond recognition, we are slowly introduced to a man caught between identities—his nationality as a citizen of the Axis-affiliated Hungary and the nation-less desert explorer, cartographer, and lover he had created for himself. Perhaps I was sensing my own divided identity as I struggled to adapt to my new home, even as my heart remained in the old country.
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The Life of Pi, by Yann Martel
By now, I was a Canadian citizen trying to find my footing in a new land that was far more foreign than I anticipated. Like Pi Patel, I had also left a country scarred by political strife and taken a voyage into unknown territory, with plenty of metaphorical storms where I had to rely on my faith to keep me afloat.
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Wild Dogs, by Helen Humphreys
I came to know the author through a writing course she was teaching at the U of T, the class that started my journey toward fiction writing. In Wild Dogs, Humphreys created the character of Alice, a woman who stands at the edge of the woods at dusk, calling for her pet dog who has turned wild. With a poetic style and an intimate voice, Wild Dogs invites us to inhabit that space between the comfort and safety of domesticity and the freedom of the wild.
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The Daughter of Doctor Moreau, by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Carlotta Moreau picks up where Alice of Wild Dogs left off. Raised like a proper lady by a mad genius who creates human-animal hybrids, she lives a life of seemingly contented docility, until circumstances awaken her true nature. At its core, Carlotta is a character pulled between human culture and the animal world. As a child, I was the little girl who wanted to watch all the monster movies. The best ones are the ones that capture the monster’s essential humanity.
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The Disappeared, by Kim Echlin
I came to know Kim Echlin’s works during a course at the U of T Creative Writing Mentorship. This is one of my favourite works by Kim Echlin. In this story, the character of Anne Greves leaves her life in Montreal to search for Serey, her lover, who has been gone for a decade, after searching for his own family in the aftermath of Pol Pot’s revolution. With only her love and hope to sustain her, Anne goes to Cambodia and finds her lost lover, against all odds, before losing him again. Once again, I see in Anne a character who is caught between worlds—her familiar if unfulfilling life in Montreal and the world she created with Serey where she experiences both the fullness of love and the depths of despair.
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The Demonologist, by Andrew Pyper
Professor David Ullman is an expert in demonic literature whose academic skepticism is challenged when his beloved daughter is stolen by evil forces. Using his knowledge of Milton’s Paradise Lost, he follows clues to save his daughter from an unspeakable but very real evil. I like this book for a number of reasons. As a born and bred Catholic, I take the existence of the spiritual realm, both good and evil, seriously. Professor Ullman’s journey from skeptical academic to believer mirrors the role my Catholic faith has played in my life. Somewhere along my journey to becoming Canadian, I had lost my faith…until a series of events slowly, but firmly, brought me back. But that’s a story for another day.
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Duran Duran, Imelda Marcos, and Me, by Lorina Mapa
I found this charming YA graphic memoir while searching for something else on Amazon. Like me, Lorina is a Filipino woman who came of age in the '80s and loved New Wave music. The author and I have similar upbringing and taste in music, and we both came to Canada to build new lives and raise families. I bought the graphic memoir because I wanted to show my daughter my old country through scenes depicting Catholic school life, family dynamics, the political climate, and of course, the extraordinary EDSA revolution that peacefully deposed the Marcos dictatorship, which ruled over the Philippines for 21 years. By reflecting on the girl she was, Lorina Mapa also gave me and others a mirror where we could look back on ourselves and the forces that shaped the women we are.
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Celestina and her love interest Josemaría first manifested in a short story in Helen Humphrey’s creative writing class at the U of T. They were born larger-than-life, and they just grew from there. Like the other characters on my reading list, Celestina is a young woman caught between worlds. The daughter of a disgraced heiress, Celestina was born between the privileged world of her mother’s wealthy family and the reduced circumstances of her own immediate family. As young woman, she survived a betrayal that brought her to the brink of death. Now she must navigate life in the Philippines, with its human conflicts and supernatural forces, as she seeks out happiness and her own place under the sun.