Collected Short Stories
2nd Edition
by Sinai C. Hamada

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No doubt the verdant mountain ranges, the mist and the cold are majestic backdrop providing much of the mystic for Hamada’s Collected Short Stories. But it is the hardy women and men, their refusal to be mere victims of nature or supposed ‘progress’, their stoic, down-to-earth decency in the face of all adversity that is the beating heart of Hamada’s fiction. Sinai’s stories are a window to a place and time long gone. The highlanders he speaks of survive but through his tales. Hamada transforms tribal myth and personal memory into lasting art. Many of Sinai’s stories were written when he was a young man and betray the longings and passions of the young: unrequited love, the desire for intimacy that unfulfilled may result in solitude, loneliness, and the abiding melancholy underlying some of his best work. Still, Hamada does not romanticize the native. His highlanders are neither innocent nor naïve to the ways of the world. They are the children, after all, of warriors who took heads and slaves and survived by their peculiar code. In the later stories we can hear the grievances and aspirations of locals whose livelihoods have been upturned by lowlanders as well as by the larger colonial and global forces at play. We see their own pretenses and machinations as they navigate the new realities. The melancholy of the earlier stories replaced it seems by a knowing, satirical tone. The contemporary reader may question certain word choices of the author, no doubt influenced by the literature and orthodoxies of his day, that sound inappropriate in our age of cultural sensitivity and ‘political correctness,’ but these too are part of the journey of Hamada’s tales from past to present, from mountain fastness to city street and academe. In the end he sings of the nobility of forebears, the triumph of family and of a love as old as the mountains. - Charlson Ong, Award winning writer, fictionist, scriptwriter

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ON SINAI C. HAMADA: OF MYTH AND MEMORY When I was requested to write a few paragraphs ‘about the book’ and separately ‘about the author’ for a new edition of Sinai C. Hamada’s ‘Collected Short Stories’, I readily agreed. Sinai is among my favorite short story writers. However, as I re-read his stories and went about the task I realized more and more the difficulty of separating Sinai C. Hamada the historical personality from him as an author. Hamada represents and also illuminates an age, a community, nearly obliterated from our collective (national) consciousness by the vicissitudes of geo-politics and war. Post WWII realities forced the deportation of many Cordillera-born Japanese descendants and the erasure of much communal memory. Sinai’s immigrant Japanese father died in an accident when Sinai was an infant and he did not learn Nihonggo. He was raised by his mother who hailed from a prominent Igrorot clan. This gave Sinai access to much native lore practice and personalities, yet he attended modern schools and eventually became a lawyer. Hamada is also among the first generation of Filipinos educated under US occupation. English was his adopted literary language, his ‘representative’ tongue (if you will) in which he sought to render the subtleties and nuances of a multiple heritage. And so, in Hamada’s stories, gesture can be weighty as word, what is said as trenchant as all that is unsaid, meaning never straight laced. Who is hero or heel, victim or villain, lover or betrayer ever uncertain or finally, irrelevant. Not to pretermit, Hamada, ever a man of letters, founded the Baguio Midland Courier on April 28, 1947. Its banner reads: Fair, Fearless, Friendly and Free. Hamada was this highland weekly newspaper’s first and most enduring Editor-in-chief. - Charlson Ong, Award winning writer, fictionist, scriptwriter

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Contributors

Author

Sinai C. Hamada

Foreword by

Francisco Arcellana