In the Palanca-winning short story, “The Axolotl Colony” by Jaime An Lim, we follow a day and night in the life of a Filipino post-graduate student living in Bloomington, Indiana by the name of Tomas Agbayani, an academic from Dumaguete. When the story opens, we immediately learn that he had just been left by his wife Edith, who had come with him to America to pursue her own graduate studies in biology—and in what proved to be the withering years of their marriage, had soon divorced him, married a white man [another academic from Rhode Island], and had taken their daughter Suzie to live with her. It is through Tomas’ eyes that we see this story unfold—and it is through that subjectivity that this piece of fiction becomes alive as an object of literature.

How does the world look like to one whose heart has just been broken? Will that persona describe things the same way if they were happy? How does our emotions affect the way we perceive things? Can literature limn this subjectivity to offer us textured storytelling that affect even the devices of narration and description, which are tools writers use to frame what they need their readers to see [and feel]? An Lim’s story is the perfect story that ably demonstrates this.

In the following excerpt, a quietly grieving Tomas, who has just spent the day going over in painful detail what exactly happened to his marriage—the growing distance between him and Edith in the ways they used to be intimate with each other, the realization that her affair with another man had started long ago when she would go on academic conferences, and the shameful uniqueness of divorce happening to a Filipino couple—gets a call from the secretary Edith’s old department at the university. They need someone to gather Edith’s things from the laboratory she used to do her research in. From the story:

Jordan Hall was on Second Street, a more interesting older building with ivy creeping up its limestone walls. The hallways, painted the usual beige, smelled strongly of formaldehyde. At regular intervals, display windows were punched into the walls, where stuffed birds and animals crouched in arrested motion and stared out with glassy eyes. Through a half-opened door, he caught a glimpse of several stretched boards where crucified cats, skinned to their raw muscles, grinned their eternal grimace of pain. Great, he thought, and nearly bumped into a waste container in his hurry to get to the end of the hallway.

“Mrs. Weinstein? I came for Edith’s….”

“Oh, yes. This way, please. I’m sorry to bug you about the table but we’re a bit overcrowded this semester.” She looked more kindly than she sounded almost motherly, in her gray cardigan and loose brown dress.

“That’s all right. I understand.”

Take note on how An Lim chooses specific words to describe the building he is entering. We get words like “creeping,” “formaldehyde,” “punched,” “arrested,” “crucified,” “skinned,” “grimace of pain,” and “glassy” littering the descriptions of Jordan Hall and its contents [the walls, the hallway, the windows, the cats]. The descriptors are very unique but also correct in their beholding of specific things, but their usage as such—as specifically chosen by An Lim—also add another layer of meaning, a subtle and psychological one, that the persona whose subjectivity we are following—Tomas’—is indeed wallowing in emotional distress. He is “punched.” He is “arrested.” He is “skinned.” He is internally “grimacing in pain.” All metaphorically speaking, of course. It is a very elegant way of giving a fictional character a lived-in interiority, by using narration and description to subtly give us a view into his mindscape.

In this same scene at Jordan Hall, Tomas goes on to collect Edith’s things from her desk, but he also witnesses the kind of biological experiments she used to be part of in this laboratory. This is when he notices the set-up of the titular axolotl colony. Axolotls are Mexican salamanders which have the uncanny ability to regenerate lost body parts. The laboratory is testing them by cutting off parts and observing how they regrow—or how they die. Tomas turns to the department secretary escorting him, and asks her: “Was Edith involved in any of…these experiments?” And the secretary replies: “Of course. It was part of her assignment. She was pretty handy with the scalpel, if I may say so myself. And she kept meticulous records of their rate of regeneration.” The telling detail!

When Tomas finally comes home, the image of mutilated axolotls haunts him. He cannot sleep, and in a seemingly last bid for reconciliation, he calls his ex-wife long-distance. Lulled from sleep, Edith tries to humor him, and to placate his distress, but Tomas finally senses that all is really lost. His wife has wielded her scalpel all too well, and has cut him off from her life, mutilating his sense of self in the process. The story ends on that melancholic note.

It is a sad story—and actually something one could call “confessional literature,” because this is Jaime An Lim putting into the guise of fiction things that have actually happened to him. He, too, had gone to Indiana to pursue his Ph.D. in literature, and had taken his wife along. And like Tomas and Edith in the story, he and his wife also got divorced.

An Lim was born in Cagayan de Oro City in 7 January 1946 , and finished his BA in English from Mindanao State University in 1968. He later pursued his MA in Creative Writing at Silliman University, and his Ph.D. in Literature at Indiana University in Bloomington. He has published a book of literary criticism, Literature and Politics: The Colonial Experience in Nine Philippine Novels [1993]; two books of short stories, Hedonicus [1998] and The Axolotl Colony [2016]; and two poetry collections, Trios [1998] and Auguries [2017]. He has won various awards from the Palanca and other bodies, and in 2000, he received the Gawad Pambansang Alagad ni Balagtas for poetry and fiction in English from the Unyon ng Manunulat sa Pilipinas. He was the Director-in-Residence of the Silliman University National Writers Workshop in 2017 and 2018. He considers himself very much a Dumaguete writer.

In a brief interview, An Lim says of his story: “Some authors tend to write about things that are familiar to them or things that have a personal significance to them. I am such a writer. I wrote the story as a way of coping with some difficult issues in my life. During our doctoral studies in the U.S., my wife and I fell out of love with each. She fell in love with an American academic. The guy was married as well. So they planned to divorce their respective spouses so that they would be free to marry each other. My wife also wanted to stay in the U.S. along with our two children. I was set on going home after my studies with one of our children. Just to be fair. [This was] easier said than done. This was the basic conflict of the story. I had to imagine some sort of resolution, vicariously if not in real life.”

He continues: “The story is part of my personal history. It was my way of explaining what happened to our marriage and family. My wife divorced me but her American lover changed his mind. So she did not get to stay in the U.S. and get an American husband. She wanted to come back to me. I said, ‘No, thank you.’ And she said: ‘Masakit ka pa unta, mamatay ka pa unta.’ I will never forget what she did and said. The story is one of life’s painful lessons for me.”