Interview with Patrick Joseph Caoile, Author of Tales from Manila Ave.

Patrick Joseph Caoile spoke with Sundress intern Penny Wei about his latest short story collection Tales from Manila Ave., where they discussed the importance of food, play as a way to navigate migration and displacement, and living on Manila Ave. and places like it.

Penny Wei: What does it mean to belong to a place like Manila Ave, where generational history and familial warmth live alongside eviction and social class divides?

Patrick Joseph Caoile: There’s a line from one of the Nightmare on Elm Street movies that Freddy Krueger says, “Every town has an Elm Street!”, which seems to hold true. I even make a reference to this in one of my stories. In the case of Elm Street, the idea that a place is inescapable sounds like a prison. But that’s not all what a sense of place can be. For me, it’s comforting that you can find a Manila Ave. in places like Queens or Jersey City. When I lived in Lafayette, Louisiana, there was one there, too. Of course, not every Manila Ave. will have the equivalent of a strong Filipino community. Still, the name implicitly gestures towards the Philippines, and with it so many associations. With its global history as a gateway between the East and the West, the capital city of Manila is an avenue in and of itself. Manila is a metropolis of culture and commerce, but also of extreme class divide between squatters and shopping malls. In cities in the US, gentrification continues to displace those who can no longer afford to live in neighborhoods where their families have flourished for years prior. And yet, people continue to eat, dance, celebrate, mourn, and tell stories. This is how I envision Manila Ave.: a container of all these contradictions—a push and a pull, a home away from home.

PW: In several stories, food serves an important role. How do you see food operating as a bridge between cultures, identities, and memories?

PJC: I find importance not just in food, but in the making of it. When I think of Filipino food, I think of how laborious it is to make. In “Along Came a Stray” the siblings decide to roll lumpia for their Christmas dinner, just as they did when they were younger. They try to hold on to a tradition that they learned from their parents. Lumpia is a very tactile dish, a lot of chopping, mixing, wrapping. And after it’s fried and cooled, you pick one up with your fingers, dip it into some sweet chili sauce, and enjoy it. But it’s worth it. Not just the taste, but the experience. A recipe is a story, right? Beginning, middle, end. So, when I write food into a story, I find it intuitive to bring characters, backstory, and theme together. “Sinigang” definitely synthesizes those goals for me, too.

Even something as simple as coffee speaks to the wider implications of food. Coffee beans need to grow in a specific climate, be cultivated, be farmed, and be harvested. It takes a lot of labor to produce a cup of coffee. There’s also its history as a product of colonization. Alongside its dispersion is a story of displacement. On the other hand, as a beverage of leisure, you’ll find people connecting over coffee—business meetings, dates, catching up with friends, revolutions. Writers, like me, can’t write a single word without it. A lot of stories have been told over coffee. In “Kapé,” I sought to write towards these implications.

Also, I just like to eat and cook. Every writer needs sustenance. I’m a product of a childhood that was shaped by shows on PBS like Yan Can Cook and America’s Test Kitchen and Food Network, where people, food, and stories coexisted. Now, I love The Bear. I wanted to be a chef when I grew up. Maybe I still do.

PW: Catholicism, superstition, and faith run through these stories in different ways. What role does religion play in shaping the Filipino immigrant experience?

PJC: Just as food brings people together, so does religion. It’s all part of custom, like the house blessing in “A State of Grace,” the wedding in “Tong, Tong, Tong,” and the funeral in “A Balikbayan Affair.” These occasions bring together titos, titas, cousins, cousins of cousins, and anyone else who might have entered the celebrants’ lives in some way, big or small. Even the idea of being blessed by an elder, the mano po that is mentioned in “Tales from Manila Ave.,” is tied up in Catholicism. But as much as these customs celebrate grace, there are also aspects of Filipino faith that have a darker edge. Pagpag, for example, is the practice of making a tertiary stop between the site of a funeral and going back home; this way, any lingering or unsettled ghosts won’t follow. I don’t explicitly reference pagpag in “A Balikbayan Affair,” but that’s part of the reason why the family is at a truck stop saloon after the funeral. There are some stories in this collection in which I dip a toe into horror or the Gothic, and I’m definitely going to explore ways to lean into these in the future. In fact, the title Tales from Manila Ave. echoes the title of Nick Joaquin’s Tales of the Tropical Gothic, which is no accident.

PW: Some of your stories sit at the edge of childhood. How do you see childhood as a lens for reckoning with larger forces of war, dictatorship, and displacement?

PJC: I think a lot about a quote from James Baldwin, “The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe; and I am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognizing this may be incapable of morality.” This has been on my mind for the past few years because of the war and genocide in Palestine, as well as the immigration raids here in the US. Whether it’s a family’s displacement from the land, or their displacement from each other, children are a witness through all of it, and so are we. Baldwin adds, “What we see in the children is what they have seen in us—or, more accurately perhaps, what they see in us.”

When I wrote these stories, I tried to center children as witnesses in some way: as communal narrators memorializing a storyteller, as sisters adjusting to an American suburb, as children trying to prevent their parents’ divorce. But even when stories take a more adult perspective, the children are always in sight, such as the widowed mother looking at her sons in the final scene of “A Balikbayan Affair,” or the first-generation Filipino American protagonists of the last two stories who are now ushering in the next generation. I think it’s important, as a worldview, to consider what it means to be a child living in an empire, where the political is always personal. Of course, Star Wars comes to mind, Avatar: The Last Airbender, too. But Scout Finch from To Kill A Mockingbird was certainly an influence in my writing, specifically as a child witnessing the changes around her, which are simultaneously political and personal.

I immigrated to the US when I was four years old. A lot of the logistics and paperwork happened behind closed doors where my parents carried the weight and anxiety of it all. I know that isn’t the same for every immigrant family. Some children need to translate for their parents, for example. But in these stories, I sought to fill in the gaps of the Filipino American immigrant story. I imagined the space between the world of children and the world of adults full of conflict, tension, and misunderstandings but also of love, hope, and connection. Children often don’t get a say in things. If they did, what would they tell us?

PW: Animals appear throughout the book. What does it mean for the nonhuman to accompany the immigrant story?

PJC: There are definitely a lot of cats in this book, prominently in “The House at the End of Maplewood Drive” and “Along Came a Stray.” In my family, we weren’t allowed to have pets growing up, except for the occasional fish or small turtle in a small tank. We had guinea pigs once, but didn’t bring them along when we moved from California to New Jersey. Only recently, just this past July, did I get my own cat, Clark Kafka “Cafecito” Kent. So, part of working cats into my stories is admittedly wish fulfillment. Usually, in that mythical notion of the American Dream, there’s a dog accompanying the mom, dad, son, and daughter. Dogs are “man’s best friend.” On the other hand, cats get a bad rep, tied up with witches and bad luck superstitions. But cats are so full of personality and also so full of care: the way a mama cat will pick up one kitten after the other to bring them to a safe place, the way she bathes them and gives them attention. The idea of bonded pairs and belonging to a litter—there’s a lot of familial connotations, like the struggle of staying together as a family. We can learn a lot from cats. Just ask T. S. Eliot and Andrew Lloyd Webber.

PW: In “Everything Must Stay” objects refuse to be discarded, even as they choke the living space. How do we measure the value of a life, or the significance/impact of a migration, with the things we keep?

PJC: The store in “Everything Must Stay” is a sari-sari, which means “miscellaneous” or “variety.” I think that meaning captures the immigrant experience in many ways. Immigrants carry a lot of baggage, literal and metaphorical. Sometimes space is limited, so what we choose to take with us must hold some kind of significance in comparison to other things. One example is the Santo Niño statue that Grace and her mother bring to their new apartment in “A State of Grace.” A toothbrush or laundry detergent—those simpler things can easily be found in a sari-sari store. At the same time, things can take on a new or second life. In the tradition of sending a balikbayan box to family in the Philippines, secondhand clothes or shelf-stable foods like canned Vienna sausages or chocolates become totems of our connection back to the motherland, back to the people we still hold dear despite the geographical distance. Objects are gifts, objects are resources. In “Everything Must Stay,” the sari-sari not only holds snacks and beauty products, but also holds the Filipino community together, and ultimately keeps the family at its center together.

PW: Childhood games—rice kites, Halloween nights, street songs—recur throughout the collection. What does it mean to return to play as a way of surviving displacement? How does childhood in general serve as a lens for exploring war?

PJC: I remember when I was just entering the first grade, when my family had just moved to New Jersey, I made friends with classmates by coming up with some really weird lore about our school. We gathered around someone’s desk, claiming that we had each seen a weird, glowing green light outside the school at night. As if we all went out of our homes, one by one, when everyone was asleep. We confirmed each other’s accounts, even drawing out a map of the school and labeling the tree where the green light was spotted. We probably could’ve passed a lie detector test; we were so convinced of ourselves. But of course, none of it was real (or was it?). I don’t know if anyone else from that class remembers, but that memory has stuck with me. As the new kid in the class, I felt welcomed by my classmates.

Play is unifying in that way—play as creative instead of competitive. Like I mentioned before, seeing the world through the eyes of children is ingrained in my approach to storytelling. Writing is play. We pretend as our characters and imagine what their lives must be like, and our task is to convince everyone else that they are true. The power of storytelling is that it centers on people, not statistics. It cuts through paperwork, bureaucracy, technicalities—that stuff of the adult world. Some might consider that escapism. At least for me, writing embraces the truth of our world. Or like how Kuya Jem does in “Tales from Manila Ave.,” it bends the truth towards magic.

PW: Several of the stories highlight women as laborers—nannies, nurses, domestic workers. Can you speak to the tension between Filipino women sustaining homes across two countries while rarely being recognized in either?

PJC: The Philippines has matriarchal roots. Despite the patriarchal structures introduced by colonization and imperialism, those roots still bloom. For example, there have been two women who’ve held office as president of the Philippines. Even through Catholicism, women seem to be the center of local religious life, leading community prayers and the rosary. They are also great storytellers in their own right; tsismis is indeed a craft. In this way, I think Filipino women might be most attuned to what it means to be Filipino. To sustain that across two countries is no easy task. It takes a lot of labor, in more ways than one. Many become Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs) in the healthcare and hospitality industries, and others as domestic workers. Many are teachers, too, like my own mother, who is a special education teacher. In all these fields and professions, there’s a necessary and intuitive sense of care. Mia Alvar captures a lot of these sentiments in her stories from In the Country, and I am so very grateful for her kind words of support for my book. Like in her stories, I similarly sought to capture the tension between Filipino women’s professional and personal lives.

PW: How does Tales from Manila Ave. as a whole explore survival across borders and generations?

PJC: I don’t think I ever considered the theme of survival in my book. But surely it’s there. I recently came across the story “Target Island” by Mariah Rigg, and in an interview with The Common, she considers how “the short story is just like a really long obituary.” When talking about Rigg’s story with my fiction students, which is about a man’s long and harrowing life intertwined with the island of Kahoʻolawe, we noted how obituaries usually end with a list of living family members, the “survived by.” In some ways, I think it’s helpful to think of short stories as obituaries.

The dedication of Tales from Manila Ave. certainly presents this book as one: to my family and relatives “in this world and the next.” In 2023 I had lost my paternal grandmother, and in the following year, 2024, I lost my maternal grandmother. We grew up mostly away from them, but whenever my siblings and I visited them in the Philippines, they were always so happy and proud of us. The last time we had seen them in person was in 2019. Their passing was a bit of a realization that my connection to the motherland was fading. Grief is always built into the immigrant story in that way. The characters in my stories get to that realization, too. I can list all the ways my characters mourn and grieve, but I would practically be listing every one of them in my stories. They grieve their parents, spouses, and siblings. They grieve a life of what-could-have-been if they had never left the Philippines at all. They are the “survived by” who have to figure out how to live with what’s left of their loved ones: customs, traditions, faith, memories, secrets, recipes, and ultimately themselves.

Tales from Manila Ave. is available now from Sundress Publications!

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