An Eye In My Navel: An Asian Immigrant's Voice by Jovita Rodas (Out of Print)

Out of print title

An Asian immigrant's voice, musings from a female journalist who was born during the US colonial years in the Philippines and who has called
Hawaii as home with her American husband. The changes in her new milieu were confusing, complex and too fast to comprehend, despite the
fact that she had stayed in Ann Arbor for some years to do graduate work in journalism in the University of Michigan. Those were the McCarthy
years. The book also talks of the Marcos years which had produced the Philippines' biggest export abroad of thousands of well-educated
professionals who left the country. True to the Filipino character, their earnings became an important source of revenue to support their families
left behind in the islands as well as support the country. There is more to the book than what was written in it and somehow, one has to read
between the lines and feel her experiences in Hawaii as part of the educational system, of the politics of the time not only in HI but also in the US
and a myriad other topics that had affected her personal life and that of her growing family. Thus, the title "The Eye in My Navel" is a metaphor of
her submerged inner pain, sometimes becoming a harsh wind that whips her body and she has to learn to reason with it.

What is the Filipino legacy of migrants to America? Carmen Guerrero Nakpil, well-known journalist from the Philippines describes it well, and I paraphrased it here - " We are Orientals about family, Spanish about love, Chinese about business and American about our ambitions. Our feelings and thoughts are the offspring of repeated and thoughtless matings between cultures which are otherwise strangers to each other. " Filipinos should adopt the best of these different cultures and let it become their persona to contribute to the melting pot of America. And the
author warns the reader in this way. "The stories offered here - I prefer to imagine - can be compared to a bouquet of flowers giving of myriad scents. Some are delicate, fragrant without having to press them to your face; some are vividly colorful and may remind you of a character or characters you enjoyed. "

2003
Publisher: Professional Self-Image, Honolulu, Hawaii.
140 pages.
Paperbound.