This is a refreshingly original and very in depth, detailed look into the diasporic Filipino community in the USA. Castillo conveys a large amount of not just cultural practises and norms, but the different values and codes of conduct and expectations held by Filipinos migrants, which are not easy to communicate without being heavy handed, but Castillo does a lot of showing rather than telling. We are plunged into the lives of a particular community in the Bay Area, who all know each other very well and the networks are extensive and sociable.
Of course, food is one of the cultural currencies, and there are many long lists scattered throughout the novel, of food recollected, or foods offered to each other in the USA:
Though Adela and Boy faithfully cooked a variety of other dishes – the adobo, the menudo, the kaldereta, the afritada, the pinakbet – the bestsellers by far were the pork barbeque or the pancit
p66
everyone ordering plates of barbeque, lumpia, kaldereta, jeprox
p150
The first bite was sitaw and kalabasa, sweet, but the sabaw was just too bitter and too salty; they’d been overgenerous with the bagoong, and there was too much okra, not enough ampalaya.
p99
Meron kami, ahh, afritada, adobe, pinakbet, pinapai,-tan, laing, kaldereta, daing na bagus, tortang talong, lechon kawali, take your pick.
p99
From the extensive listings of food throughout the novel, it is clear how significant a role food has in this culture.
Our main protagonist is Hero, trained as a doctor, and from the elite family of De Veras, who joins the New People’s Army and serves there for 10 years, before being captured and held in a prison camp for 2 years where she is questioned, and her thumbs broken. When she is released, Pol, her De Vera uncle, who had been a surgeon in Jakarta but has emigrated to the USA, gives her refuge in America, and has Hero babysitting his 8-year old daughter, Roni. Pol is married to Paz, who works many jobs in nursing and care homes, to make ends meet. This novel brings out the class structure in the Philippines in many ways, and the background story of how Paz and Pol met is one such illustration of class differences; Paz being much poorer and of the working classes, than the elite and much-feted Pol, son of a wealthy, influential family.
It is interesting that this class structure is able to persist and still have currency even outside of the Philippines – Hero is surprised to encounter it in California,
When Hero first left for Isabela, she thought that would be the last she’d hear of people like the Yaptangos, the Marcoses, the De Veras. But they were everywhere. And now they were even here, in California.
p218
Clearly, sometimes, social capital can travel and remain pertinent, even when uprooted and transplanted.
The other thing which this novel does well, is bring out how diverse the Filipino community is, with many different languages and peoples. We hear of Illocano, Pangasinan, as well as the national language of Tagalog. It is interesting that in the USA, Roni, a second generation migrant, may not feel the division of these differences, and may not even notice the differences, which would have mattered so much in the Philippines:
Paz had a habit of speaking to Roni in a mixture of English, Tagalog, and Pangasinan. It felt like Roni didn’t know the difference between Tagalog and Pangasinan, and moved between the two interchangeably as if they were one language. Nobody had told her otherwise, Hero supposed. But for Hero, listening to the mixture was like listening to a radio whose transmission would occasionally short out; she’d get a half sentence, then nothing – eventually the intelligible parts would start back up, but she’d already lost her place in the conversation.
p49
It is quite amusing that Castillo writes of how Hero struggles with fragmented communications – so perhaps the writing in the novel intentionally puts the reader through a similar experience – but if I have a criticism of this novel, it is that there are too many other-language insertions which are left unexplained, the context does not provide enough to guess at the meaning, and sometimes, some fairly key words (one guesses!) are also rendered untranslated. It is fine to impart a direct flavour of this different culture, but the narrative should be a bridge, not a barrier, to understanding. Many writers do typically include other languages in their writing of English novels, but there can be too much of a good thing when the inclusions are too numerous to the point of disrupting the flow of the story or the understanding of the reader, or when the inclusions are not well selected and placed, and fragment communications. However, the latter half of the novel does a better job in translating and explaining the foreign language phrases and words.
But even if the non-Filipino reader may stumble over unfamiliar words which confuse the meaning in the first half of the novel, there are just so many good elements to enjoy. One of them is the subtle mentions thrown in here and there of practises and norms which set this culture apart, and remind the non-Filipino reader how different it may be from the more mainstream. For example,
She apologized to Lulay, who accepted the apology grudgingly, which was her way of being kind. For Lulay, it was a kindness to hold grudges, to be stingy with forgiveness; it made things matter.
p196
This is a great and illustrative little episode, demonstrating how there can be many different ways to be kind, and many different interpretations of forgiveness and whether it is a virtue or not.
It is of course useful to have Hero as a protagonist, who can not only compare the Filipino community in the Philippines and in the USA, but also remember how things were in a different generation and era in the Philippines. For example, noticing the differences through foods:
Filipinos in the Bay ate on a daily basis the things Hero remembered eating only during fiestas and special occasions – pancit, lechon kawali, bibingka. In the restaurant she never saw anybody eat any of the things that she’d been used to growing up: the lomo-lomo with intestines, lungs, liver, and heart; the sinanglao with kamias fruit instead of tamarind; the pipian with pasotes, the Vigan longanisa that was smaller and crispier than the fat, sweet Kapampangan-style ones they served at the restaurant. And no one in the Bay seemed to eat goat.
p166
Hero is welcomed and supported by the warm, inclusive diasporic Filipino community in California, and gradually builds a new life for herself, nurtured by her relatives and the community’s kindness and allowances for her needs and limitations.
It is a wonderful read in all, packed with great details, richly textured, imparting a charming cultural experience to the non-Filipino reader, plunging the reader into the world of Filipino migrants, their food culture, their challenges and struggles and pleasures and parties.
I love that there are more diasporas writing books. Not all are great but each one adds to the fabric of immigrant writing.