Filipinas Quotes

“All the Filipina wives are playing native dancers, and their
husbands are playing conquistadors, because what were

conquistadors if not small-town men with beer breath
wearing plastic armor, holding a figurine of a brown baby

Jesus while a native woman throws them the keys to their
Buick sedan asking them to grab the paper plates.”
― Marianne Chan, All Heathens

“When the Man at the Party Said He Wanted to Own a Filipino

I should’ve said that all I’ve ever wanted was to own
a fifty-year-old white man (which is what he was),
but I didn’t say that, because it wasn’t true. Instead, I said

nothing, but I almost said, amicably: Yes, our bodies
are banging, aren’t they? Our skin is leather upholstery
beneath the savage sun, our eyes are fruits fallen

from the highest trees, the bottoms of our unshod feet
the color of amethyst.”
― Marianne Chan, All Heathens

“I realize now that this story was never about us
being owned, because we will always own ourselves.”
― Marianne Chan, All Heathens

“Not Eve, but Eve's Filipino half sister, bad dancer, lute player, naked and fat, fermenting grains, painting veins with berries and clay, shoots the shit with snake and tree beneath moonlight, while God, Eve, and even Adam make fires in caves, drawing pictures of buffalo and horses on walls, like a bunch of wacko, hallucinating tunnel dwellers.”
― Marianne Chan, All Heathens