Abakada

‘Every few years, since legal adulthood, I’d moved cities or countries. I wondered if this was an adaptive response to colonialism and diaspora, encoded in my miscegenated, globally interwoven DNA. Or maybe I had cultural ADHD. Or maybe, you know, commitment issues.’

Lara Day remembers the exact moment she stopped speaking Tagalog, her Filipino mother tongue, because her English father couldn’t understand her. From this moment of loss, Abakada takes a spiralling journey across decades and continents, as Lara grows up in colonial Hong Kong to endure chronic fatigue in the UK, a coup in Thailand, a pandemic in Australia – and terrible boyfriends in more than one country.

Told alphabetically, Abakada sifts through the pieces of life with humour and insight, weaving together themes of family, voice and lineage, to find a language all of its own.