A Professional Lola

A Professional Lola is a collection of short stories that blend literary fiction with the surreal to present the contemporary Filipino American experience and its universal themes of love, family, and identity. A family hires an actress to play their beloved grandmother at a party; a couple craving Filipino food rob a panaderya; a coven of Filipino witches cast a spell on their husbands; a Lolo transforms into a Lola. These are just a few of the stories in the collection that represent its roster of stories beautifully grounded in culture and vividly and meticulously painted to make the absurd seem mundane and the commonplace, sinister. Professional Lola embodies the joy, mystery, humor, sadness, hunger, and family that inhabit modern-day Filipino American virtues.

ADVANCE PRAISE

“A Professional Lola is a story collection that works by way of small, tiny miracles: a family hires a professional “lola”—to remember the grandmother they’ve lost; a couple bonds over their homesickness for just the right Filipino food—and will resort to the most drastic means to get it. In one story, a divorce lawyer wears an “elaborately embroidered white barong” to greet his firm’s clients instead of a suit and tie, this white barong that hugs our hero’s boss “like a coat of mist” comes to stand in for the confidence, charisma, and imperviousness to grief our narrator lacks—and must claw back through his own past to find.

Every story is madly scented with food we can’t help but salivate over: “skewered lapu-lapu and blue crab” over ‘an open fire while rice steamed in banana leaves . . . the smell of mint, cilantro, kalamansi, ginger;” we crave the saba banana slices of turon that crackle and wheeze until “transformed golden brown;” the buko, ube, and red bean pandesal worth dreaming of stealing; or the bilo-bilo description that causes one twin to realize his brother has fallen in love.

These tales of Filipinos and Filipino Americans—gay, bi, straight, trans, lovelorn, longing, curious, grief-stricken and hopeful—are a breath of fresh air. Each story is like a snapshot, a curio, a windowpane glimpse into lives caught mid-moment and on the verge. Populated by ex-beauty queens and performances artists, dancers and nurses, lawyers, stick-up artists, and Bigfoot obsessives, each story is an engine unto itself. E.P. Tuazon is a bright star who is only getting started.
—ZZ Packer

 “The stories in A Professional Lola are hilarious, heartbreaking, and true. Like members of one big Filipino family, these characters love hard and squabble often, lose themselves in the nostalgia of suburban malls and VHS movies, and grapple with a reality mired in COVID and Duterte. These stories are simultaneously classic and urgently contemporary, and they’ll stay with you long after the final word. E.P. Tuazon is a writer to watch.”
—Lysley Tenorio, author of The Son of Good Fortune

“Tuazon has a talent for merging the strangeness of the world with the emotional impact of human connectivity.”
—Rebecca Rubenstein, Senior Editor for The Rumpus

“E.P. Tuazon’s unique voice captures the essence of the Filipino diaspora—the ambivalence and aches, the hopes and aspirations, but also the humor and delights.”
—Cindy Fazzi, Author of My MacArthur and Multo