Any Day With You

Any Day With You is a sweet story about a Filipina-American girl and her relationship with her great grandfather. It’s a slow burn for a middle grade novel, but it is definitely one I will save in my own personal library in hopes my son and I can read it together someday. I loved learning the bits about Filipino folklore and mythology, and I craved to be able to speak with my Lola about it all. It also included an important part of Filipino and American History that often gets erased when we discuss WW2. CW: War Atrocities

“I was part of a catastrophic event called the Bataan Death March. This was when 75,000 captured allied soldiers – Filipinos and Americans – were forced to march from sunrise to sunset, nearly sixty-five miles across the Bataan Peninsula along Manila Bay in April of 1942. We were not given any food or water. We suffered from heatstroke and starvation. We were physically beaten along the way. Many of my friends died, some of them left to rot when we could not carry them. It could easily have been me, and there has not been a single day since that I’ve taken my life for granted. It’s why I try to stroll each evening and watch the sunset. It’s my personal marker of what I’ve lived through and what I still have to achieve. At the end of the March we were crammed into trains and brought to an internment camp. Somehow I had survived to that point, but the camp was torture, so many soldiers died from disease and malnutrition, some beheaded… The Philippines was a former colony of the United States, so those of us who fought were nationals; we should have received the same benefits as all American soldiers, including citizenship. But a law was passed that stripped us of these rights. We were left unrecognized, our role erased, and we’re still fighting for that recognition to this day. Sadly, it’s too late for some. There are not many of us survivors left.”

So often BIPOC narratives get erased from the white settler history books. I love seeing #MGLit tackle these topics head on, unafraid of the horrible truths in American colonial history.
#WeLoveMGLit #AnyDayWithYou #MaeRespicio