Book Review Contemporary Fiction by Filipinos in America

(I only got the copy of this review now although I was aware that Manoa did a review of the anthology. Contemporary Fiction by Filipinos in America is available from ANVIL (www.anvilpublishing.com);email: anvilpublishing@yahoo.com)

BOOK REVIEW
CONTEMPORARY FICTION by FILIPINOS IN AMERICA
Edited by Cecilia Manguerra Brainard
Anvil Publishing, 1997, 254 pages
MANOA, Vol. 13, No., 1, Silence to Light: Japan and the Shadows of War (Summer, 2001) pp. 201-203
by Harold Augenbraum

Contemporary F iction by Filipinos in America.Edited by Cecilia
Manguerra Brainard. Pasig City, Philippines: Anvil Publishing, 1997.
254 pages, paper $22.95.


A couple of years ago, I asked a colleague of mine who was preparing a comprehensive
anthology of world literature which Filipino writers he was going to
include.He wasn't aware of any, he replied, adding that they probably hadn't been
translated yet.


I explained that many of the best Filipino writers in the Philippines wrote in
English, a legacy of American colonialism from 1898 to 1946. With great enthusiasm
and some hope, I mentioned a half dozen that he might want to consider,
including N .V. M. Gonzalez, L inda Ty-Casper, and F.Sionil Jose. I wasn't surprised,
however, when the anthology appeared without a one.


In the United States, the Philippines has always been esteemed for its strategic
importance while Filipino culture has been almost invisible.The truth is that the
Philippines has a rich literary heritage, extending from the archipelago to the various
other countries in which Filipinos have settled, including former colonial
masters Spain and the United States.The writers who have made a name for themselves
in the States-Carlos Bulosan, Bienvenido Santos, Linda Ty-Casper,
Ninotchka Rosca, perhaps N ick Carbo, and certainly JessicaH agedorn - are few,
though their writing is powerful and consistently good. Hagedorn is the most
honored: her nomination for the National Book Award for Dogeaters brought
some attention to lesser-known F ilipino writers toiling in the vineyards of the literary
lord, such as Cecilia Manguerra Brainard. The University of Washington
Press has loyally kept Santos and Bulosan in print, as well as brought Gonzalez to
the attention of the American public - about as much as a small university house
can do for these writers.


The anthologies of Filipino and Filipino American writing published in the
States have also appeared infrequently. In 1966, Leonard Casper, a prominent
critic and the husband of LindaT y-Casper, compiled an extraordinary collection
called New Writing from the Philippines. A few Filipino American pieces were
included in the seminal 1974 Asian American anthology Aiieee! though the vastly
different experiences of Filipinos in the States, and a wholly different literary tradition,
resulted in two separate introductions to the book: one for Chinese and
Japanese Americans; the other for Filipino Americans.


In 1992, Luis Francia edited the marvelous Brown River,White Ocean, which
thrived despite the publisher's barely useable design. F rancia's next contribution
was 1996's Flippin' Filipinos on America, which he and Eric Gamalinda edited for
the Asian American Writers' Workshop, based in New York. A writer's book,
composed half of poetry and half of prose, it is filled with the sheer pleasure of literary
achievement and remains the best Filipino American anthology available
today.


Cecilia Manguerra Brainard's 1993 anthology, F iction by Filipinos in America,
was a low-budget collection published by New Day Publishers in Quezon City,
Philippines. For it she collected a good cross-section of Filipino writers, from the
little known to the more accomplished, producing a good introduction to Filipino
writing in America.Contemporary Fiction by Filipinos in America, also published
in the Philippines, covers some of the same grounds even of the twenty-five contributors were included in the earlier collection, though it is comforting to see
Gonzalez and Ty-Casper again.

(Linda Ty-Casper)


Since the late nineteenth century, the Philippines has been wracked by political
difficulties: its revolt against Spain in 1898, American domination, a Japanese
invasion,and the Marcos plutocracy. Yet except for the hints of this situation in
Gonzalez's story "Confessions of a Dawn P erson," and the migrant background in
Alma Jill Dizon's promising "Bride," the stories in Contemporary Fiction by Filipinos
in America focus little, if at all, on the history of the Filipino experience in
the Philippines. This is a favorite theme of at least one U.S..-resident writer who is
not included here, Ninotchka Rosca, who weaves that history into the fabric of her
work.


With its political legacy omitted, the Philippines is neither idealized nor demonized.
As an ancestral home, the place of one's consciousness before coming to
America, it becomes another "worldly" place: subtly powerful, vivid, and distant.
Within the Filipino a nd Filipino American world, trials and tribulations focus the
self within a social context, but not on the context. Even in Brainard'cs ontribution,
" Flip Gothic," in which an uncontrollable young woman on the verge of
adulthood is sent by her family in the States to live with her grandmother in
Manila, the national culture of the Philippines is subjugated to the household culture,
and the homeland is affective, but amorphous.


By pulling these personal, fictional quests together, the reader indeed comes
away with a varied portrait of Filipinos in America, not the expression of dark
causality present in the earlier generations of writers, such as Bulosan and Santos-
those fantastic conjurors of Filipino America n literature - but of people cautiously
settling into what they hope will be a comfortable position.


In Veronica Montes's "Of M idgets and Beautiful Cousins," a Filipino American
teenager and her sister, visiting their cousins in Manila, are taken to a dance club
called "Small World," where the entire staf is made up of midgets.The girl is nervous
and edgy. Against a backdrop of raucous eroticism - American soldiers hoot
at the torch singer onstage - her cousin introduces her to a friend of his who is a
waiter there and who shows an obvious interest in her. This makes her feel even
more anxious, and she panics. They leave, and as they walk through the rain to
their car, the waiter comes running up with an umbrella to shelter her - a sad ending
to a sad evening of Filipinos, Americans, and Filipino Americans.


So many of these stories convey loneliness, disconnectedness, and an inability
to form lasting attachments. They are stories rooted in rootlessness. Dizon's
" Bride" harkens back to the days before World War II, when Pinoys made up a
good part of the migrant workers on the plantations of Hawai'i, California, and
Oregon. Cut off from the women of their homeland, they would troll the streets
for hours, seeking companionship, drifting in and out of Chinese bordellos and
dance bars - pictures that Bulosan drew with pathos and lyricism. Dizon's Candido
has left a family behind in the Philippines; his wife has died and his children
moved away. Decades pass. H awai'ii s now a state, the gateway to America. An old
man, Candido receives a letter from a cousin. She knows a young woman who
might want to marry, w hich Candido recognizesa s an obvious immigration ploy.
Despite this, he agrees and they wed. She quickly becomes pregnant, an unexpected
event since Candido is in his early seventies. Two months after the birth of
their child, she commits suicide.


The well-worn ground of the woman in a sanitarium is LindaT y-Casper's
cenario in "Dark Star/Altered Seeds."F rom a lesser writer, the story might be stale,
but Ty-Casper is so deft with language - a fact known to readers of literary magazines
and the slim novels she has published with Readers International, Inc. - it
seems fresh. The narrator's husband has left her for another woman, but his
return does not cure the ills that abandonment has caused:
Is she pretty? Was t hat the question that woke her up? Then why did he leave?
Every nameless, faceless woman; every young and jubilant face she meets
becomes that woman. She. When he holds her now she becomes her, too.
The narrator's own identity has been usurped by her husband's thoughtless
exchange of women, and even the reader becomes somewhat confused by the
manner in which Ty-Casper has placed her pronouns. This collection abounds
with such tension.


Though Contemporary Fiction by Filipinos in America could benefit from the
addition of a bit more humor and a few East Coast writers - such as Rosca, Gamalinda,
Hagedorn, and Regie Cabico - these are quibbles. Brainard has done a fine
job of bringing many ittle-known writers - and the edginess of Filipinosi n America -
to the fore.


HAROLD AUGENBRAUM