Filipino novelist Joni Cham is set to read from her book and give a talk on the creative writing process on 24 July 2012, at 10:15 am at the 2nd floor of the SU Robert & Metta Silliman Library.
This is part of the Writers Reading Series initiated by the newly-instituted Edilberto & Edith Tiempo Creative Writing Center of Silliman University.
In My Mother’s House is the debut novel by Cham, published by Central Books in 2012. The novel won the Special Jury Prize at Premio Tomas, the UST Quadricentennial Literary Prize.
Writers and critics have been unanimous in their praise of the novel. According to poet Cirilo Bautista, Cham will, “in due time, be a bright light in Philippine literature.”
Novelist Charlson Ong writes that the book is “an honest and insightful exploration of the complex, sometimes tortured, relationship between an immigrant Chinese mother and her Philippine-born daughter… [The novel] guides us across a minefield of personal, familial and cross-cultural trauma to that place made safer by the finality of death and the possibility of forgiveness and re-birth.”
Poet and critic J. Neil C. Garcia writes that the book “announces itself as a novel about domesticity, and that it is. And yet, in the hands of first-time novelist Cham, this task is by no means simple or unassuming. Here is an incisive and at times merciless unpacking of a troubled mother-daughter relationship, complicated by the heady cultural dynamic attending ‘Chinese-ness’ and all that it implies in a morally repressive, ritually pious and middle-class Philippines. Cham’s unlikely heroine, dark-skinned bearer of a profound personal darkness, must wrestle with the difficult ghosts of her unfinished past, even as she must seek to reconcile herself with its overbearing specter, to whom she must render filial devotion at the same time that she must repudiate it, if only to survive. A closely observed and intimately written family drama, harrowing in its critique of familial pieties, out of whose charred ruins must emerge the harried possibility of love.”
Cham has worked as a China analyst for over four years. Prior to that, she taught literature at Far Eastern University and De La Salle University, where she completed her AB Literature and MFA Creative Writing degrees. (Ian Rosales Casocot/ CWC)
