Customer Reviews

Child of Two Worlds: An Autobiography of a Filipino-American or Vice Versa

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Great reading - perhaps because I am a fil-am who has been there, so I have a biased perspective. To qualify, I am NOT of that period, which makes this interesting for those of us first generation Fil-ams in the post-war period. Very rare to see a memoir by a "non-VIP" - i.e. I was a war hero, dissident and or politician" and the author writes it with appealing candor. This is not for the war-buff as he was imprisoned after the fall of Corregidor but very informative and insightful into the time when the Philippines was still a US colony, of which there are few written accounts and stories from the Filipino side, most biographies it seems to me, being during and after WWII. He talks about how his parents met (he gleaned most of the info it seems from his mother who lived until the mid-70;s) and the bulk of the book is devoted to his childhood period- appropriately as indicated in the title -in Manila during the short Commonwealth period until it was interrupted by the Japanese invasion, by which point the narrator is already a young man in college. I wont give away more details but suffice to say this is a rare historical book by a greater rarity - a son of a Filipino father and American woman born during the 1920's when Manila was beginning to have American style suburb and amenities. I'm certainly glad I discovered this one.

Never has a writer colorfully described the World War II as Norman Reyes. He successfully remembered all the rich details of having to live in the Philippines during the pre-war era when the country was being Americanized. His rich details of the war and his heroic acts during the occupation of the Japanese brings us the front seat experience of how Filipinos and Americans became involved in such a bloody fight considered as one of the bloodiest in Philippine history