Asian Journal- The Filipino-American Community Newspaper

LOS ANGELES—Five Filipino and American authors talked about their works during the Authors’ Night event organized by Philippine Expressions Bookshop at the Philippine Consulate on Friday, April 24.

Authors’ Night" is traditionally held on the eve of the Los Angeles Festival of Books, says Linda Nietes, owner of Philippine Expressions, a mail order importer of books by Filipino Americans in search of their roots, and other foreign writers who write about their experiences in the Philippines and with Filipinos.

On Friday, April 26 the organizer and the Philippine Consul General, Mary Jo Bernardo Aragon, hosted Carina Monica Montoya (aka) Carina Forsyth, who is the author of Filipinos in Hollywood, which was released last year; Angus Lorenzen, who at age seven, fled Japanese-occupied North China with his sister and mother, days before the Pear Harbor attack, only to be captured in Manila and held in the Santo Tomas University Interment Camp for more than three years. His book is titled A Lovely Little War: Life in a Japanese Prison Camp through the Eyes of a Child.

Estrella Besinga Sybinsky is the author of Portents and Promises: Echoes of Politics, People and Places, a collection of free verse that encourages reflection and thought. Penelope V. Flores, co-author of the Philippine Jeepney: A Metaphor for Understanding the Filipino American Family, has a Ph.D. in Comparative and International Education from the University of Chicago.

Claude Tayag is a well-known painter, sculptor and furniture designer, as well as chef and author of Food Tour and one of the featured culinary writers in another book, Kulinarya: A Guidebook to Philippine Cuisine.

In her book, Montoya wrote about the influx of the earliest Filipino immigrants to Los Angeles in the 1920s, many of who suffered discrimination and were prevented from marrying outside of their race, until in the 1940s, when the United States gradually began opening its doors to families. "These early immigrants settled in enclaves in the Little Tokyo section of downtown Los Angeles and in Bakersfield, an agricultural town in the San Joaquin Valley. She also talked about the Filipino immigrants’ eventual transfer to the Temple-Beverly corridor, in what is now known as Historic Filipinotown, driven out of their Little Tokyo enclave by commercial development. "You have to understand the history of Filipinotown," Montoya stressed. "There were a lot of hard work, tears; there were organizations and lots of big street parades," Montoya said, comparing the settlement to Plymouth Rock, the spot where the first immigrants from England landed in America.