Quote by R. Zamora Linmark: “Home is where the heart breaks, again and again, and still we return.”

Home is not simply a comfortable place — it is where we are most vulnerable, most known, and most likely to be hurt. Families and communities wound us in ways strangers cannot. Yet we keep returning because belonging — even imperfect, painful belonging — is more powerful than the pain it sometimes causes.

Linmark published Rolling the R's in 1997, a period when Filipino-American literature was asserting a distinct identity within Asian-American cultural movements. The novel's setting in 1970s Honolulu engaged with the layered colonial histories — Spanish, American, and internal — that shape Filipino diasporic identity.

Filipino-American novelist and poet, born in Manila in 1968 and raised in Honolulu, Hawaii. His debut novel Rolling the R's explored queer Filipino-American youth with dark humor and linguistic playfulness, and he is one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary Filipino diasporic literature.