![]() Our mother was the one who washed and starched and pressed my uniform each night, as if that would fool the sugar heiresses and Senate daughters at my school into mistaking me for one of their own. He’d already be muddling through traffic on EDSA Boulevard by the time I rose and got into my own X-shaped necktie and school girl pleats. Each morning, Andoy woke before they did, put on his gloves and trousers in the dark, and drove from the suburbs to the slums to collect me. The car belonged to the family my brother worked for, as a live-in chauffeur. And certainly we weren’t fooling anyone: not the neighbors in our barangay, not the nuns who’d given me a scholarship to their convent school in San Lorenzo. ![]() It wasn’t his, of course, any more than the rented uniform I wore was mine. When I was in high school, long ago, my brother Andoy used to drop me off and pick me up from campus in a Cadillac. The following is a story from the collection. The heart of these stories can be found in their exploration of universal themes such as displacement, the desire for human connection, loss, and, ultimately, hope. Her debut collection sheds light on the Filipino diaspora, with each story following the various journeys of men, women, and their families as they leave their homes in search of a new, but not always better, life abroad. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction for In the Country: Stories. ![]() Mia Alvar is the winner of the 2016 PEN/Robert W.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |