Fil-Am pens debut novel ‘Love Can’t Feed You’

Filipino American Cherry Lou Sy is releasing her debut novel “Love Cant Feed You.” CONTRIBUTED

NEW YORK — Filipino American Cherry Lou Sy is releasing her debut novel “Love Can’t Feed You,” described as a “tender yet searing coming-of-age novel about a young Filipina woman suspended between two countries, two identities, and two parents.”

Readers will be introduced to Queenie, who is torn between her family’s expectations and her own burning desires.

Queenie, her brother and their elderly Chinese father arrive in the United States from the Philippines to find that her Filipina mother, who’d been working as a nurse in Brooklyn for some time, is now a different woman than the one they knew.

On the cusp of adulthood, Queenie dreams of attending college but her parents can’t afford to support both children. Stretching themselves to assimilate, her family begins to fall apart.

Queenie starts to explore the nature of her relationships with her mother, her father, her own sexuality and the new country she’s immigrated to as she juggles her many identities: Filipina, Chinese, New Yorker, immigrant, daughter, sister, student, worker, woman, friend, lover.

Inspiration

“I was always interested in prose writing,” says Sy. “I even got into an MFA program run by [Filipino American novelist and playwright] Jessica Hagedorn at Long Island University. She liked my prose but she praised my playwriting after reading a one-act I [had written].”

Sy then went on to an experimental playwriting program at Brooklyn College ran by author, poet and playwright Mac Wellman. “Mac was all about experimenting in not just form, but genre. He told me that I should work on a novel if I wanted to.”

Sy was taking her master’s in playwriting when she began working on the novel. “The story of the narrator, Queenie, wouldn’t leave me,” she says. “I saw myself in her and I could also see her as a student at Brooklyn College, where I was an adjunct lecturer, encountering people who are like her. Earnest, curious and hungry for change, despite or because of their histories.”

“At the time, I was reading Marguerite Duras’s ‘The Lover’ and was haunted by the story of an impoverished 15-year-old white girl who has an affair with a rich 27-year-old Chinese man in French Indochina in the 1930s.

“I had never read anything like it, and it made me think of my own background being half-Chinese and half-Filipino.

“What if the protagonist of the book had a child with her Chinese lover? How would it have ended differently? I superimposed this question onto the dynamics of my own family – my mother was 17 years younger than my Chinese father – and began writing.”

Frustations, grief, multitude

The story started to become more concrete during the pandemic. “Everything stopped. My career as a theater artist stalled. There was no pipeline for me to enter and Zoom theater was incredibly frustrating. I felt so disconnected with theatermaking as a practice and just started focusing on my novel,” she says.

“It was also shaped by the death of my father. We thought that he was attacked because he had a head fracture and was found at a bus stop. He died two months later.”

Though she initially tried to process her grief through theater work and had applied for fellowships, those efforts did not pan out. “That’s when I turned to prose to deal with my grief,” she says.

“The pivot seemed natural. The pandemic was the key event. It made me think about myself as an artist.

“Anyway, a story is like water. Just as water tries to find its way to the sea, a story will find a way to be told. And one can be both a playwright, a novelist and a multitude of other things.”

There will be a book launch for “Love Can’t Feed You” on Oct. 7, 2024 at Powerhouse Arena Bookstore, Brooklyn, New York. Walter Ang is the author of “Barangay to Broadway: Filipino American Theater.” Available at Amazon, Bookshop and other online booksellers.

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