On Zines

Making a zine requires a vision. It’s an attempt to capture a feeling. It’s also one of the most accessible ways to artistic release, amongst the standards of the publication process. Let’s face it – everyone at the beginning of the quarantine had a passion project. Sticking to a project to its bitter end is what separates those that dabble to those that often have a lot of blood, sweat, and tears to shed. As melodramatic as it sounds, creating a piece requires focus of what’s in front of you and visibility of those that listen to your crazy ideas or influence them. While making zines this quarantine, I also used it as a period to heal. Much like my fellow writers, visual artists, and literati, I was dead set on chiming in as a part of the collective voices of this generation.

The first zine I had made, “Gypsy Sun,” was borne from grief. I had lost my grandfather a couple of years ago, and I spent a lost year in Seattle trying to put together the pieces of my all new reality. The theme of the zine was “Heaven and Hell on Earth.” The first half starts with photos curated to elicit claustrophobia, fear, and grime. These included photographs of litter, bars, empty bottles, and literal shit. The latter half includes photos of open spaces to symbolize transcendence – or an ascension of the former pages’ jagged edges. I sent out the 10 copies of the zine to close family and friends in an attempt to reach out.

The initial process of “Sing, little sparrow, sing” was humor. It was a counterpart to “Gypsy Sun.” I had started it the summer of 2020, a period of time that oscillates between memories of sitting in cluttered apartment, in the shadows, away from the summer’s scorching sun and the paranoia being on the train, hoping that I could make it to point B unscathed. My first pitches of the zine played with the idea of origin. I took it upon myself to employ a similar process to the first zine by surveying my digital repository. I found trends amongst the photographs, and I started to brainstorm how they all might relate. It then had me thinking about the reason we take photographs. I’m not a photographer, but I imagine it’s to capture a moment. I even toyed with the idea of digital stewardship, or the idea of how a photograph could be opened, viewed, accessed until it starts to degrade in resolution over the years. I had found photographs from 2010 from an old Samsung phone that now looked like colored dust bunched up together across the computer screen. If you squinted hard enough, you’d be able to notice the image in front of you.

Much like life, I ignored the big picture and continued to work on “Sing, little sparrow, sing.” Then my grandmother died.

Tasked with the nonexistent deadline to create a new work, I started to think about origin. My grandmother, who we called Mommy, grew up in the early 20th century. Much of the stories that my Ma tells me about her include stories of survival. When the Japanese invaded the Philippines, stories of soldiers committing war crimes (killing, raping, pillaging) in the country spread across the Motherland. Japanese soldiers had paid a visit to my great grandmother’s home. I imagine that great grandma heard something unfamiliar, voices that were foreign tongue, and acted in an a way any mother would. Before the Japanese soldiers arrived at her door front, she pushed my grandmother out of a window to hide her. Mommy fell down to the earth, away from the soldiers, and hidden in the shadows. I wondered if she held breath and listened to their footsteps fade away into the night. She would come out of hiding and embrace her mother – a moment where she may have realized that home is more than just a physical place.

When I finished the zine, I came to the realization that humor for me, for a very long time, was a way of covering up painful memories. The project may have started with humor, because I was in a living situation that put my girlfriend and I in danger. I used to laugh at the absurdity of our crumbling environment – it’s clogged sinks, freezing temperatures, and slippery stairs. One day, she fell down those stairs. I had felt protective of her, and it was the first time in my life where I felt responsible for my reactions and how to approach a gray pasture. I thought about how protecting the ones we love are often a result of the lingering damages that happen to us or are passed down to us. Life tends to be funny due to our desperate attempts to cover up what’s really there. For me, I had been laughing for far too long, and I needed to understand how to uncover the many moments where things changed. By confronting myself, in the form of archival survey and reflection with many friends and family, I understood that change was possible. I understood that recognizing the writing on the walls was the first step. That remembering is courageous. In the end, I published “Sing, little sparrow, sing,” as an ode to the women in my life. It’s an origin story, because without my grandma, I wouldn’t know where I was from.