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What they say about Maningning:

From Marjorie M. Evasco:

Raised in the China of the Cultural Revolution, she (Maningning) learned the language of austere discipline and creative invention, dreaming of someday becoming a poet who painted with words, and a painter who brought images to light.
                                                                        Foreword
                                                                                                Voice from the Underworld
                                                                                                Anvil, 2000, 2002, p.xi

Elegy For Maningning Miclat

We first met in words and images, Maningning and I. Thirteen years ago, she sent a poem and a painting for the feminist issue of ANI I was editing for the CCP Coordinating Center for Literature. The poem "Father and I" spoke of the spirited 15 years old who, even then, already had a book of poems in Mandarin. The watercolor "Bato at Bulaklak" likewise showed what she knew of discipline as an artist who had already mounted her first exhibit.

But it was only in 1990 when I met Maningning in person. She came to see me in the university armed with a sheaf of poems in English and Filipino, and a copy of her first book in Chinese. Maningning wanted to apply for the Summer National Writer's Workshop in Dumaguete City and needed someone who knew her poetry to recommend her. Edith and Edilberto Tiempo gave her a fellowship in the summer in 1991, and from what I heard it was a May time of sun, sea and dolphins. In the next five years after Dumaguete, Maningning devoted her time and energies to honing her two gifts: writing poetry and and painting.

On July 6, 1996, she went again in the university, this time bringing with her a folio poems - her translation of the early poems in Chinese, and the new ones in English and Tagalog. She confided that she wanted to publish her "dream book"- one that would contain her poems in three languages with which she traversed her marvelous and terrifying worlds. And asked me to help her read her poems more closely in terms of craft, so that she could revise them before sending them off to a publisher. Moreover, she asked if we could keep the work just between us. I sensed her determination and was glad about the harmony between her need to work quietly and my own strong sense of privacy. We agreed that I would look over the poems in English, but I arranged with her that I'd limit myself in pointing out the parts which could be improved and that I would leave the music and sense of the poetry to her.

Maningning was delighted and like a happy child she read to me two of her poems in Mandarin and her tentative translations in English. We immediately went to work on these two poems and found the words which rendered her translation not only precise, but also vigorous. On that first day of working together, we rewarded ourselves with a delicious lunch at the Met Museum and she told stories about her work, her adventures and misadventures, her loves new and past, her dreams. Afterwards, we viewed the exhibit on "Sailing" and British woodcuts.

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