Synopses & Reviews
Review
"Lolas’ House is the last stand of women who survived the kidnapping and rape that was Japanese army strategy in World War II. Courageous, aged grandmothers tell their stories and show their wounded bodies to M. Evelina Galang as evidence that these crimes occurred." Maxine Hong Kingston, author of The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts
Review
"The strength, courage and perseverance of these women is, truthfully, sort of life changing. Crimes against women are still under-reported and often go unrecognised. This is a book that shines a light in a dark place." Aisling Twomey, Book Riot
Synopsis
During World War II more than one thousand Filipinas were kidnapped by the Imperial Japanese Army.
Lolas' House tells the stories of sixteen surviving Filipino "comfort women."
M. Evelina Galang enters into the lives of the women at Lolas' House, a community center in metro Manila. She accompanies them to the sites of their abduction and protests with them at the gates of the Japanese embassy. Each woman gives her testimony, and even though the women relive their horror at each telling, they offer their stories so that no woman anywhere should suffer wartime rape and torture.
Lolas' House is a book of testimony, but it is also a book of witness, of survival, and of the female body. Intensely personal and globally political, it is the legacy of Lolas' House to the world.
About the Author
M. Evelina Galang has been researching and documenting the lives of surviving Filipino “comfort women” since 1999. She is the author of several books and the editor of Screaming Monkeys: Critiques of Asian American Images. Galang directs the M.F.A. Creative Writing Program at the University of Miami and is core faculty and board member of Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation (VONA).