Know the Animal starts with a Filipina woman immigrating to the US from the Philippines due to increasing violence surrounding her family's business. Attempting to fast track her citizenship, she hires someone to falsify her marriage status with Mat who agrees to the transaction but only at a price. This common immigrant experience of fleeing violence for a better life resurfaces in several way throughout the photo novel. Later in the photo novel she is then threatened by Mat with deportation after the false-marriage leads to domestic abuse. What follows is a series of incidents that leaves her and others around her in fear of their lives. The excerpt above occurs in the photo novel when Mat jeopardizes this false marriage by not signing and delivering documents due to the US government.
About the Author: My parents immigrated to San Francisco, California from the Philippines in the late 1960s as a result of the Immigration Act of 1965 that lifted immigration quotas for people entering the USA from Asian countries. Their story along with the stories of their generation help frame this submission to the Sustainable Arts Foundation by inspiring me to build my story based on their experiences. As a child born in a California suburb, I always struggled with my ethnic identity. Growing up in a mostly white suburb south of San Francisco, not only was I far removed from the Filipino culture, I was often unable to communicate with many of my relatives due to my limited understanding of the Filipino language; yet I was also proud of being Filipino. I currently live with my Vietnamese partner and our three year old son named Anam in Brooklyn New York. He is at an age where he is easily influenced by the stories he listens to. He will not only position himself as characters in the stories that we read to him but he will also ask questions in regards to why people (or monsters) do what they do. His curiosity to understand shapes my artistic decision-making when it comes to storytelling. I would like him to know that the way we communicate to the world and the way that we are communicated to are reflections of our cultural influences and race. One of the ways that Anam is beginning to understand difference is that he is becoming aware that he speaks to his mother in Vietnamese but speaks English to everyone else including me. I think that being aware of this point of difference will give Anam a better appreciation and understanding of his mother's culture; a Vietnamese culture that could all but disappear for some Vietnamese children born I the USA.