My So-Called #QuarantineLife

I am about to enter a term of online teaching, turning me into a first-year teacher all over again. At the same time, though, I have been doing intense research into the background of my character Liddy, heroine of Sugar Communion. (You can keep up with my reading progress on Goodreads.) As a doctor (or “hen medic” as they were called disparagingly), Liddy is a woman of science. She is a fern instead of a flower, a point of pride for a practical and methodical heroine. After all, it is the logarithmic spiral of a fiddlehead in which one finds the unity of beauty and mathematics. This is the same spiral of the Nautilus pompilius, a rich species of mollusk in the waters of the Tañon Strait off the coast of Bais—the shell-hunting ground of none other than Father Andrés Gabiana? Ah yes, the game is afoot.

But the real world intrudes in on my thoughts too, and I cannot help but see the historical parallels. In the Sugar Sun series, I have spent a lot of time writing about historical epidemics, like the 1902 cholera outbreak in the Philippines. Under the Sugar Sun begins with a scene of ham-handed American attempts to limit the spread of disease. Though cholera is passed by a bacterium not a virus, the type of stay-at-home/shelter-in-place self-quarantine now in place for coronavirus would have worked better for the Filipinos than the activist (and sometimes racist) policies applied by imperialist doctors. None of this is quite #quarantineandchill material, but there is something to be said for finding the happily-ever-after in times like these. Tempting Hymn is the story of a survivor of that epidemic who falls for a nurse. (She is a double heroine—thank you, medical professionals!)

Cholera has long been a sideshow of war. For the Americans in Manila, it was a challenge to modernity and “benevolent assimilation.” Also, silly naval surgeons. Wile E. Dog takes her livestock guarding seriously, even if I am the only stock she is guarding.