This novel provides a lively new angle of experience of the Filipino diaspora in California, and particularly, in Las Vegas. Filipinos have been arriving in California since the start of the 20th century, and currently actually, the American History Museum is hosting an exhibition called How Can You Forget Me: Filipino American Stories, featuring artifacts from the 1910s, when the mostly male migrants to Stockton, California, arrived and created Little Manila and contributed to the agricultural sector of the state.
Moderation has a whole different set of migrants, but following on in that tradition of Filipino migration to the USA. Girlie is our protagonist, a first-generation Filipina-American in her mid-thirties, working for a social media moderation centre, with and expertise on moderating content for child sexual abuse. Although Girlie is born in California, her parents are from Milpitas, in the Philippines. As Girlie moves through her day in Vegas, there are security guards, waitresses, shopkeepers, who are all apparently part of the Filipino community, recognising each other and greeting each other as ‘ate’ and ‘kuya’ (terms of respect for anyone older, something like older sister and older brother).
Commenting on why so many Filipinos seem to be in the service industry there, Castillo has this to say:
“As for why so many of them were Filipino – well, what was there to say that hadn’t been said in 1765; in 1899; in 1946; in 1965? The bootstraps way of putting it was to say they excelled, frankly, in the manner of people who had been formed to excel in those very specific theaters: because they spoke and read good English, because they respected chains of command, because they kept a positive attitude, because they would take a fifth of an American worker’s pay, and most of all: because they were familiar. Rhey knew Americans; what they liked, what they didn’t, the ditties they sang, the food they ate, what they looked like when they were horny, what they looked like when they were dying […] There was no other country in the world, no other people in the world, better suited to the content moderation of America” (p9).
Castillo places Girlie in context, explaining her legacy as a diasporic Filipino in global service:
“Her mother was a nurse, her aunts and distant cousins all nurses and maids and cleaners scattered everywhere from Jeddah to Singapore to Rome. There was a glowing line that trailed through them, all the way back to that first early Pinay…[…] A glowing line through the,, like a lava-bright rift in the earth, which traveled all the way to Girlie: there in the office park, cleaning their feeds of stubborn stains of rape and bludgeoning; there in the Vegas desert, far from home; there in the soul-shaped place called heredity” (p9-10).
Girlie seems to carry the world on her shoulders, or at least the world of her community. She has to look out for Maribel, a younger cousin – help her arrange a 30th birthday party, advise her, pay for her, steer her aunt and uncle (Maribel’s parents) away from the slot machines, as well as do her duty by the rest of her family, especially to her mother.
“[…] Girlie had paid off twenty thousand dollars of her mother’s IRS debts within the first two years on the job, then bought her mother a Tesla Y after her first raise, financed, while Girlie herself still took the bus” (p26).
This kind of duty apparently needs not only to be done but to seen to be done publicly:
“[…] Girlie, there to buy some starter Tiffany for her mother, doing what every eldest daughter did with her paycheck: tithing”(p18)
Her friends commenting on Girlie’s mother’s Facebook posts:
“wow auntie ang ganda!! Beautiful Goyard bag. What a good daughter you have, Happy Birthday and God bless” (p18).
Girlie is widely known as the best content moderator in the company, Reeden, but she can be prickly, and perhaps even antisocial with her colleagues. Girlie perhaps makes her own life more challenging by stubbornly upholding certain values,
“There was not yet a universe in which Girlie was going to allow any of her food to be paid for by a younger cousin. Civilizations, etc” (p29)
and bristling at any hint of impugning on her intelligence,
“She thought of how much easier her life would be if she wasn’t so easily baited at the slightest hint of underestimation from someone in an economic class above hers” (p65)
It is interesting how Castillo’s novel intersects issues of social class and economic class.
Although this novel contributes to the diasporic Filipino literature in depicting the Filipino workers on the digital industry, there are plenty of touch points which link it with the existing literature. Like so many other diasporic Filipino novels – which were usually about domestic workers – Moderation plays up the cliches of Filipinos being money oriented, materialistic and brand-name loving:
“A Filipina auntie could detect incipient money, smell it off you like bad B.O.” (p71)
It also flags up this diaspora being community and family spirited, hard workers, and fairly progressive-liberal compared to many other groups of Asians, particularly in terms of sexual identities, Girlie being for example being ‘the battle-hardened bisexual’ of her family. Castillo has interesting things to say about how this sexual identity still has to be negotiated all the same,
“No one was more effusive about the beauty of men of color than women of color with white partners” (p78).
The first part of the novel was the strongest and most interesting part of the novel, with these comments and observations about the diasporic community. The novel then goes too much into Girlie’s new job of being content moderator in a Virtual Reality, which was not uninteresting even if there was much less now on the social observations, but at least better than what the novel declines into, which is a love story, a rather predictable one at that, yawn. Could have stopped reading after the first 100 pages, but that first part of the novel was definitely worth reading.
Recent Comments