Why this site exists
This memoir has sat as a job I’ve meant to do for years — to take Kay Fox’s account of the war in the Philippines and make it something anyone could read, anywhere. It was always a big job, and other work always got in the way.
The release of Anthropic’s Fable model in mid-2026 finally gave me both a reason and a way to begin. I treated it as a chance to see what the new tools could do, and to get a first draft of the site online at last. The work was a back-and-forth: I gave Fable the full text, and we worked through the problems together — chief among them, what to do about the lack of pictures.
Why there are no photographs
When the war ended, Kay and Ren had nothing. They walked out of internment with nothing. Everything they had owned at San Rogue was gone — the house and all it held, destroyed. And in the eighteen months of hiding before that, moving from island to island, no one was taking photographs. There is almost no visual record of any of it.
That left a choice: present the book plainly, with no images and no narration — or try to give readers some way to picture and hear it.
The illustrations
We settled on asking Fable to read each chapter and write image prompts drawn from Kay’s own descriptions — the gulf, the bancas at night, the towns, the cone of Mt. Mayon. Those prompts were run through OpenAI’s image model (gpt-image-2). The pictures show places and scenes only — never Kay, Ren, or the people they knew. That was deliberate: I didn’t want to put invented faces to real people.
The narration
The audiobook is read by an ElevenLabs voice model — the full text, in six parts.
A note on honesty
The voice and the images are good, but they aren’t perfect; now and then you’ll feel a touch of the uncanny valley. I want to be plain about that. Nothing here is meant to deceive. The words are entirely Kay’s, unchanged — only the chapter titles were added, to help with navigation. The images and narration are openly machine-made, and I’d rather say so than have you wonder.
It was, in the end, a pragmatic decision. I think the pictures and the reading make the book easier to follow, more vivid, and more alive — and I hope you find the same. As these tools improve, I’ll come back and rework the site.
A note from me
I’m Steve Fox — Kay’s grandson. My father, Chris, was born in the Santo Tomas internment camp in September 1943, in the middle of the events this book describes. I’m named after my uncle Steve, one of the two small boys who appears all through these pages.
If you have any connection to this story — a memory, a correction, a name, a photograph that somehow survived — I would genuinely love to hear from you. You can reach me at email me.