There is always something about Dumaguete that invites a doubling of perception: the city as paradise, and the city as an escape into disquiet. In Bacolod writer Marianne Villanueva’s “Dumaguete,” the first story out in her most recent collection Residents of the Deep [Unsolicited Press, 2025], we get the story of Carlos and his mother’s sojourn to the city unfolding in the measured cadences of memory, edged with the sharp pangs of abandonment. Here, Dumaguete is ostensibly the backdrop—but really, it is the theatre of a child’s initiation into loneliness, betrayal, and premature knowledge of adult duplicities.

Stowed away by his mother away from his father and into the languor of promenades and resorts [specifically Seven Seas Resort, a stand-in for South Seas Resort of yore, now The Henry Resort], Carlos senses all too clearly the cracks beneath the performance of holiday. The crocodile farm and zoo, the old acacias in Silliman University—all these are catalogued with the innocent wonder of a boy, yet underscored with the shadow of a mother slipping away. Villanueva renders the mother with a troubling glamour: her green-eyed sadness, her floaty dresses, her sudden absences into the hotel lobby. Carlos’s gaze is both adoring and accusatory, and through it the reader sees the larger fissures in a family—his father’s affairs, his mother’s evasions, his yaya’s whispered warnings of aswang and witches.

The brilliance of the story lies in its refusal to be about Dumaguete as tourist idyll. The city becomes instead an emotional landscape, haunted by the boy’s fear of being left behind, the boy’s fragile strategies of mimicry and pantomime to keep his mother’s attention. Even the menace of strangers—drunken men in sunglasses, a pistol tucked against khaki pants—becomes a metaphor for the encroaching adult world that Carlos must learn to navigate.

Villanueva’s “Dumaguete” is also less a travelogue than a reckoning. It is about the terrible knowledge a child inherits when he realizes that paradise is never innocent, that even mangoes, ripe and golden, cannot mask the sour taste of abandonment. In that psychological regard, it is very precise.

There is indeed a precision to Villanueva’s fiction, as if each sentence were a scalpel cutting into the intimate flesh of exile, memory, and longing. She was born and raised in Manila, with Bacolod roots, and was later transplanted to the United States when she became a Stegner Fellow in Creative Writing at Stanford University in San Francisco, and has since then been writing and publishing stories about the Philippines and Filipino-Americans since the mid-1980s. She is the author of the short story collections Ginseng and Other Tales from Manila [1991], Mayor of the Roses [2005], and The Lost Language [2009]. Her novella, Jenalyn, was a 2014 finalist for the United Kingdom’s Saboteur Award, and her individual stories have been finalists for the O. Henry Literature Prize, nominated for the Pushcart, and included in Wigleaf’s Top 50 (Very) Short Fiction of 2016. She has also edited an anthology of Filipino women’s writings, Going Home to a Landscape, which was selected as a Notable Book by the prestigious Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize.

In many of these works, Villanueva inhabits that unsettled terrain we call diaspora, where home is both a point of origin and a persistent ache. Her stories are deceptively quiet, but they shimmer with suppressed ferocity. They are, in fact, about survival: how women navigate silence, how families are fractured by geography and history, how desire is always tinged with danger.

Villanueva’s voice, one might say, is one of displacement, but it is never rootless. Even when she writes about Manila or Bacolod or Dumaguete, or elsewhere in the United States, she is charting the internal geographies of her characters—children abandoned to their own devices, women marked by absence, men diminished by betrayal. In her prose, places refuse to remain mere backdrops; they bristle with unease, as though the very air carries the weight of memory. The Dumaguete in her story, for instance, is rendered not as the idyllic “City of Gentle People,” but as a stage for a boy’s terror of abandonment—and perhaps imagined from real life. “I visited Dumaguete with my son and niece when they were both about nine. So, that’s the basis of the story,” she told me.

In Residents of the Deep, Marianne Villanueva returns with a collection that summons both the physical vastness and metaphorical weight of seas and oceans. The title story, in particular, uses the ocean not merely as setting but as a crucible of moral reckoning: a ship captain finds a submerged city beneath fathoms of water, and in its discovery is forced to confront what duty, responsibility, and human ambition demand when one explores what is meant to be out of reach.

This fascination with what lies beneath—depths unseen, lives unimagined—is matched elsewhere in the collection. The ocean becomes a threshold: between what humans can know and what must remain mysterious, between surface identities and submerged truths. In stories like “Ice,” Villanueva explores liminal spaces—post-apocalyptic wastelands, small cities, familial relationships—yet it is the deep waters of the title story that most fully dramatize that boundary between surface and abyss. “[I love] stories about the sea. I love writing about oceans,” she also told me.

Through recurring imagery of water—its calm, its hidden currents, its capacity to obscure—Villanueva probes human resilience. The sea’s depths mirror inner depths: guilt, longing, moral ambiguity. The ocean in this book is both metaphor and character: sometimes hostile, sometimes beckoning, always inscrutable. In Residents of the Deep, Villanueva’s seas are not places for escape so much as confrontations with what we carry beneath our skins.