Child of the Sun: Memories of a Philippine Boyhood

Lonn Taylor, a historian, wrote a memoir titled "Child of the Sun" about his experience growing up in the Philippines from 1947 to 1955. He was aware of the ruins of war and the resilience of the Filipino people, which shaped his belief in multiculturalism. Taylor honed a keen sense of difference in class, culture, and language as an American child in the Philippines and an outsider in postwar America.

\n Format: Paperback / softback
\n Length: 240 pages
\n Publication date: 30 September 2020
\n Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
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Lonn Taylor, a historian, has had a successful career as a curator in history museums, including the Smithsonian Institution. After retiring, he wrote weekly columns on the people and places of Texas, signed the Rambling Boy, which were widely distributed in print and on the radio. This book stands out from his numerous other books on historical and literary topics as it is the only one he wrote about himself and the last book he wrote before he died in June 2019. It describes how his experience of growing up in the Philippines from 1947 to 1955 shaped his entire life by teaching him the destructive power of war.

In the Philippines, his father was employed as a civil engineer building and rebuilding roads and bridges in the war-devastated islands. Taylor lived most of his daily life in a well-protected bubble of white colonialism, and he thought nothing about it. Despite that well-protected bubble, Taylor was aware of the ruins all around him, the ravages of bombs and artillery shells, and of his Filipino neighbors unbowed by their loss of wealth and privilege, or their confinement and starvation in Japanese internment camps. The manifest strengths and resilience of a society blended of Malay, Chinese, Spanish, and American cultures made him a lifelong believer in the benefits of multiculturalism, even as he bore witness to the islands' postcolonial woes: a feudal agricultural system maintained by landlords with private armies, corruption so endemic that even post office clerks expected tips for selling stamps, and deadly outbreaks of personal violence.

As an American child in the Philippines, and then, inevitably, an outsider in the postwar America he returned to at fifteen, Taylor honed a keen and varied sense of difference in class, culture, and language.

\n Weight: 376g\n
Dimension: 152 x 228 x 19 (mm)\n
ISBN-13: 9780806167121\n \n