I’m starting to confront now living in the United States as opposed to living back in the
Philippines. Why I’ve decided to do that. It’s important to me to know why, and would I
die here? That’s my new question. Is this the country where I want to die and be buried?
If so, maybeit’s because this is a country that allows you to reinvent yourself.
Bonetti: The two ideas are interrelated, are they not? Confronting
your demons and reinventing your history in the sense of overcoming false things that are
taught to you by the textbooks when you’re in school? I was intrigued by the sense of
correcting history in your work. Is that what you’re getting at?
Hagedorn: Even revisionists can be cloudy when they revise history, so
I’m very suspicious of that too. It goes back to memory. What we choose to remember is
also colored, don’t you think? How, for example, I elevate the mother to this Rita
Hayworth vision. And the father, who is a more troubled character, but still charming. The
charming gangster. I have these archetypes in my memory. Even my memory is questionable,
of course, but it’s the memory I live with. So, there are things from your childhood that
are always with you, and perhaps they were always an illusion anyway but, yet and still,
you have to be fueled by something.
Bonetti: At the age of fourteen, you were taken by your mother from
Manila out of one very multi-ethnic culture into America, another multi-ethnic culture.
What was that like?
Hagedorn: It was terrible at first. Luckily, she chose to live in San
Franciscoand not in someplace where we would’ve stood out. There was a multi-ethnic
community and, luckily, there was Chinatown, for God’s sake, which we constantly went to.
It was the closest thing to Manila we could find. I was at such a terrible age, so gawky
and awkward, and I didn’t know whether I was grown up or still a child. So it was a weird
time. Also exciting. I mean I had always fancied that I would travel once I was old
enough, and live in many places in the world, so I had that adventurer thing anyway. It’s
just that it happened a little too abruptly. And I was uprooted in the middle of my school
work and I wasn’t ready to go then, it was not the time. Too many adjustments too fast.
But I was also flexible and we all were tougher than we thought. It took a turn for the
better when I realized that one of the positive things about it was that as a female
person, I suddenly had a sense of freedom that I never had growing up in Manila in that
over-protected colonial environment—the girl with her chaperones and everything that
still goes on, that kind of tradition. And even though girls are not discouraged from
going to school, they’re still expected to marry and have a family and that’s the subtext
of everything. In America, suddenly I was free from those shackles. And because my mother
was preoccupied with trying to make a new life for herself, reinventing herself at age
forty, she could not control me as much as she would have liked too. So there was a pay
off for me.
Bonetti: Was this when you started writing?
Hagedorn: I started writing seriously then. I had always written. As a
child, I loved to read and I always thought of myself as a writer. You know, I was very
dramatic. I would write little poems and I loved to make little comic books. I would
illustrate them, four-page comic books, and thought of myself as a writer. When I was
fourteen, my mother gave me a typewriter, thank heavens, and I guess she thought that
would be a healthy way to keep me at home. I would type poems and read.
Bonetti: And then I’ve heard that somebody in your family sent them to
Kenneth Rexroth? How did that come to happen?
Hagedorn: We had a family friend who knew a lot of what was going on
in San Francisco. He would come over and I showed him my poems because he was a reader, so
it was nice to talk books with him. And he gave them to a journalist friend of his who
thought to send them to Rexroth. Kenneth at the time was writing for the San Francisco Chronicle,
I think, or The Examiner, one of those papers. He’d write about whatever he
wanted, always about art and culture with a little bit of politics thrown in. He called up
and said, "Why don’t you and your mother come for dinner?" He had a daughter my
age, and it turned out he lived in the neighborhood. So it all fell into place. I found
out that he was this wonderful poet and semi-controversial, which of course appealed to my
rebellious nature and I thought, "Oh, yummy, you know. It’s not some corny old
guy." He became something like my mentor in that he had all these books, thousands of
books. Poetry, novels. And he said, "Just come over here whenever you want. You can
borrow books." He would invite me out with his daughter to go to readings and to do
all these beatnik things like go to a book store at nine o’clock at night, which I was
just so thrilled by. And he’d get me books and he’d say "Here, you should read
this." He wasn’t didactic about it. He just said, "You should look at Mallarme.
Look at the French surrealists. Look at this." I guess he trusted my intelligence
enough to know he didn’t have to lecture me. And I would sit in on his classes at San
Francisco State.
Bonetti: Is there a reason why you didn’t go on to college?
Hagedorn: I don’t like academic settings very much. I find them
oppressive. I like learning in a much more unconstructed way. I also was very interested
in the theater at the time. One thing Kenneth showed me by turning me on to all these
writers who were not much older than me, who were writing what to me seemed very exciting
at the time, was that you didn’t need to have a college degree to be an artist. It was,
you know, the sixties. So, I turned my back on it and went instead to the American
Conservatory Theater, a two-year acting and theater arts program.
Bonetti: So you did go on to school. You went to a conservatory
instead.
Hagedorn: Yeah. There were no degrees though. It was practical.
Bonetti: What about that, being practical? Did you think atall in
terms of writing and theater as something you could earn your living doing?
Hagedorn: I was very naive. I always thought I would eventually make a
living. And I had a very romantic notion of art, that it was a higher calling. I had all
kinds of jobs. I worked at Macy’s. I worked at the post office. But I always sort of had
faith that one day I would make a living off the writing or the acting or directing. It
didn’t bother me. It was a great time when you could live with ten people in one room. It
was wonderful.
Bonetti: So where did the fiction fit in to your work? Taking on a
novel is a very daunting, long term task.
Hagedorn: What made me want to write a novel was reading One
Hundred Years of Solitude by Garcia Marquez. I was turned on to that by a friend from
Mexico who gave me the book. It was like holy communion or something. I said
"Yes!" Here is a novel that reads so lyrically and so poetically, and yet is a
novel. It’s a wonderful story. You want to know what happens to these people. And at the
same time I saw the connection for me. It was like the Philippines was something I was
carrying around and I didn’t know what art form it would take to convey the story I wanted
to tell, and I read that book and said, "That’s it. One day I’m gonna do it." I
started devouring all the other writers that were being translated at the time—Manuel
Puig, Cortazar and others. I went on a frenzy. The early `70s was the Latin American boom
in translation. And I would buy them as they came out. And I stored all of that away.
Bonetti: Is there anything that you can identify that you bring from
the poetry and from your love of music into the fiction?
Hagedorn: Rhythm. And I think the love of language, the sheer word
play. I love words. The sound of words, and puns. It’s very Filipino too. Filipinos love
puns and word plays and they love language, the intonations and the nuances. They take it
seriously. They also play with it.
Bonetti: A subject that we’ve only touched on is the question of
Hollywood and the movies,the American movie industry, on the culture that you grew up in.
It seems as though the Philippines were really swept away by American movies in terms of
expectations and a particular view of the world. And this has been noted as a phenomena
that happened other places too, like in South America. And you’ve continued to have a
great interest in the power of film.
Hagedorn: I think it was a great colonial tool. Even if it was
entertainment, and it was, an industry that was begun out of a desire to entertain and to
make money. Somewhat innocent in that way, crass but innocent. Yet, I think it’s a
wonderful way to seduce the minds and the hearts of people. It’s a very powerful medium.
You sit in the dark. Everything is larger than life. It tells a good story in a short
amount of time. It’s very easy to be swayed by it. It’s as close to life as you can
imagine. And yet, there’s something magic about it because everybody looks good.
Everybody’s a giant. And it’s beautiful or it’s hyper whatever-it-is. It’s hyper-ugly,
hyper-violent, hyper-beautiful.
Bonetti: And it instructs us about how we are supposed to see
ourselves and how we’re supposed to see the world? In speaking of this very factor in
Dogeaters, John Updike said, "A borrowed American culture [borrowed from the movies
he's talking about] has given Filipinos dreams but not the means to make dreams come
true." And that you as a writer are as good as anybody he’s ever come across in
showing the impact of the movies on, as he put it "the young minds of the third
world." And you didn’t have any corrective, any North American corrective when you
walked out into the streets of Manila afterward. Can you say how this shaped the
generation you grew up in? Do you think that the American movie culture had anything to do
with keeping people from seeing what was really going on around them?
Hagedorn: No, that’s sort of minor. I think we all need our escapes.
But I’m not going to say that just because you can run into an air-conditioned theater for
two hours out of the day to escape from the heat and the oppression and lose yourself
that, you know, the movie musical is the root of our problems.
Bonetti: But is there a way in which Hollywood shaped Filipino
cultural attitudes?
Hagedorn: In our notions of beauty, OK? These Gods and Goddesses of
the West were constantly being fed to us. They didn’t look like us. We thought they were
exotic. I remember the first time I saw a woman with red hair and blue eyes in the
Philippines. I just couldn’t stop staring. And even in our own movie industry, the big
stars of the time were the people with the more refined features. You weren’t going to get
the pure Filipino look on the screen. They would always get the lighter mestiza. A lot of
cultural shame is reinforced by these movies.
Bonetti: As a writer you have made film a central part of your
esthetic.
Hagedorn: For other people perhaps it was something else that brought
them to certain conclusions about their lives and their identities. But, for me, film was
truly one of the more powerful sources of entertainment, enlightenment, disillusionment.
So, I use it a lot. In the writing of Dogeaters, especially, the movies were
there because they were absolutely part of the fabric of my memory. Once I found that key,
all the doors started swinging open in my imagination.
Bonetti: In Charlie Chan is Dead, an anthology of Asian
American literature that you recently edited, you wrote that you were "eager to
subvert the very definition of what was considered fiction." I’m interested in
knowing what you meant by that. How do you feel your own work subverts the very definition
of fiction?
Hagedorn: In Dogeaters, the easiest way to answer that one is
the way I use what are considered factual documents. For example, the McKinley Speech is
not a fiction, it’s a real speech he made in 1898. There’s also an Associated Press
bulletin called "Insect Bounty" that’s real as well as a fiction that I made up.
And there are fake newspaper items along with real newspaper items with real people’s
names, and it all fits into this sort of novel form. I play with what is considered fake
and made up and actual facts of history. I think, too, in the way I use language. In the
fact that I use Tagalog without a glossary. The story is not linear. It doesn’t follow the
traditional form of a novel, and the time frame isn’t clear. It goes around and around. I
go back and forth between the fifties and the eighties, quite comfortably I think.
Bonetti: Is there any sense in which you are writing for a purpose, to
correct stereotypes or to reinvent history in a way that corrects wrongs?
Hagedorn: If I were to write with that agenda in mind, then I’d
destroy the writing. No, I write really because I have to and if the writing also destroys
some of those myths and subverts forms and makes people question the very idea of the
writer, the woman, the Filipino-American, the whatever, great!
Bonetti: Where does art have to come from to accomplish those kinds of
ends? If you set out directly to accomplish them, you probably wouldn’t have writing that
is, in your opinion, worth reading? So, where does it have to come from?
Hagedorn: It has to come from the deepest, deepest, deepest insides of
your soul. And it’s got to be brutally honest. It’s like pornography. You know it when you
are doing it and you know when you’re bullshitting. You know when you’re being
self-conscious and contrived and forcing something to be there because you want to make
sure that people get the point. You know when that’s happening. But if you just really
listen to yourself and to your characters, you don’t go for the easy stuff.
Bonetti: The other major art form that we haven’t talked about yet is
your involvment in the world of music. As I understand it, for a number of years you had a
band called The Gangster Choir. Is that right? Can you tell us about that, and
what kind of an influence this experience has had on your life as a writer?
Hagedorn: I formed the band in 1975 because I was a poet at the time,
very active in doing live readings and starting to think about readings as performance. We
didn’t have all of those terms in the Bay Area like "performance art," which to
me is a very East Coast kind of label. We just did it. But I knew there was something more
I wanted to do than stand up there with a piece of paper or with a book and read. So I had
an idea that maybe there was a way to work with a band. I had heard a little bit of The
Last Poets, for example, who actually had a record. And I got very excited by the
idea of the spoken word to music. So, you could call this rapping before its time.
Bonetti: How did the band actually come about?
Hagedorn: I called Julian Priester, a composer friend of mine, and
asked him to help me get some musicians together. I didn’t really think the musicians
would go for it, but they all showed up. We started rehearsing. Julian and I wrote three
things that had chorus parts, so we included singers. It was such a wonderful experience I
decided to just go for it. Whenever I could, if there was a performance coming up or a
reading where they could actually have the entire band there, I would include them and we
became sort of a fixture in the Bay area poetry-and-music scene. And the band in various
forms grew to nine or ten people, full horn section, electric guitars, bass, back-up
singers. You name it, we had it. It lasted for around ten years and when I moved to New
York, a couple of the people moved with me and we re-formed again, dropped the "West
Coast" from The Gangster Choir title and just called ourselves The
Gangster Choir. And we worked in all the clubs. You know, there was the New Wave
scene, CBGB’s, the Mudd Club, all that. And we had to become more
musical. And I just figured, if Sid Vicious can sing, I can sing too. It was very
liberating for me, and the band became more streamlined and edgy. It was an interesting
time to be around with a band in the `80s. Part of that will be covered in my next novel I
hope, one I’m working on now.
Bonetti: But allthis was while you were working on Dogeaters?
Hagedorn: My daughter was born in the `80s, and I reallywanted to
begin working on the novel. Maybe having a child made me realize that I might be old
enough to attempt a mature work. And there was a point where I said, "I cannot be
everything and do everything and write a novel. Something’s got to go." I knew the
novel was going to be a big undertaking, and I had to be alone to really focus. So the
band was disbanded. But I still work with music when the occasion is right. Last year, I
went to San Francisco for a music festival and they asked me to put a band together. They
gave me a budget to hire local people. It was great. So now from time to time I’d like to
continue performing because it’s a different kind of high when you perform musically. It’s
just such great fun, and with good musicians it can elevate the words to another level and
enhance the poetry, and it’s marvelous!
from The Missouri Review