My identity is linked to my grandmother, who’s pure Filipino, as pure as you can probably get. And that shaped my imagination. So that’s how I identify. – Jessica Hagedorn
I think for a lot of so-called post-colonial peoples, there’s a feeling of not being quite legitimate, of not being pure enough. – Jessica Hagedorn
Growing up in the Philippines, I loved all kinds of movies. We had a very healthy film industry there when I was a child. – Jessica Hagedorn
I don’t believe in sampling some Tibetan music just to make it sound groovy, but you do your homework, you understand what you’re doing with it. – Jessica Hagedorn
I have been definitely influenced more by Latin American writers than by any other type of writer. They are very close in terms of voice – their humor, their fatalism, their… well, that over-used term ‘magical realism.’ It’s a wonderful term that’s just been used so much, we don’t know what it means anymore. – Jessica Hagedorn
I’m preparing for a multimedia theater piece, Airport Music, that’s coming up in New York City. – Jessica Hagedorn
I’m part Spanish. My paternal grandfather came from Spain via Singapore to Manila. On my mother’s side it’s more mixture, with a Filipino mother and a father who was Scotch Irish-French; you know, white American hybrid. And I also have on my father’s side a great-great-grandmother who was Chinese. So, I’m a hybrid. – Jessica Hagedorn
But I think there’s a genuine joy, too, a sense that no matter what, even if my stomach’s growling, I’m going to dance. That’s what I want to leave people with at the end of the play. After all this, people still know how to live. – Jessica Hagedorn
Hybridity keeps me from being rigid about most things. It has taught me to appreciate the contradictions in the world and in my life. I scavenge from the best. – Jessica Hagedorn
We didn’t have television until I was about eight years old, so it was either the movies or radio. A lot of radio drama. That was our television, you know. We had to use our imagination. So it was really those two things, and the comics, that I immersed myself in as a child. – Jessica Hagedorn
I don’t know what issues concerning identity have helped contemporary fiction evolve to what it is now. All I know is that the range of voices that are being heard and published is a lot more diverse than when I was coming up. – Jessica Hagedorn
There were also horror shows on the radio. Very terrifying and thrilling to me as a kid. They had all these creepy sound effects. They would come on at ten o’clock at night, and I just would scare myself to death. – Jessica Hagedorn
I’m an underdog person, so I align myself with those who seem to be not considered valuable in polite society. – Jessica Hagedorn
I love writing dialogue, and I think a lot of my writing is visual and very cinematic. – Jessica Hagedorn
Life is not simple, and people can’t be boxed into being either heroes or villains. – Jessica Hagedorn
