Growing up in the Philippines, I loved all kinds of movies. We had a very healthy film industry there when I was a child.

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.

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.

I’m preparing for a multimedia theater piece, Airport Music, that’s coming up in New York City.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It’s not just NYU. There are days when I feel like I’m stranded in some upscale mall in Pasadena. Don’t even get me started on the insidious transformation of Bleecker Street!