Back-Azimuth: Filipino Writers Abroad
By Leonard Casper

This essay first appeared in Kinaadman,Vol. 27, Valedictory Issue, Miguel Bernad, S.J., editor.

In the mid-2003 issue of the Philippine News (Los Angeles), Juan L. Mercado ("It's Good to be a Pinoy") offered a glossary of vernacular terms—for family relationships, street foods, clothing, transportation, folk festivals, underworld mythology, kapwa togetherness, and the like—which, when overheard, identify the overseas Filipino even when surrounded by a polyphony of strangers.  Similarly there is often something distinctively Filipino in the novels which both Pinay and Pinoy have managed to shepherd into print in sister English-speaking countries.1 Whether presented by mainline publishing houses or by some modest ones, together these constitute a firm foundation for future submissions by one's kababayans. Above all, such writers continue to take pride in proving that though expatriates, they are not expatriots. While following their own personal compass readings forward, they have not forgotten where the back-azimuth charts the tides of mind to Filipinas, their Motherland.

This is the common theme for the stories collected by Marianne Villanueva and Virginia Cereno in Going Home to a Landscape (2003) which in turn resembles the motif of Father Miguel Bernad's History Against the Landscape (1968). Among recent expatriate novelists measuring the closeness to their beginnings, some consider Jessica Hagedorn (rather than Ninotchka Rosca, for example) as their forerunner. Hagedorn, who has aggressively seized attention both on the American West and East coasts, has already matured beyond the caustic critic that she was when still influenced by Beat Generation "rebels." If Dogeaters (1990) comes close to portraying Metro Manila as a modern Sodom, The Gangster of Love could pass for New York as Gomorrah.2 Significantly, her central character Raquel/Rocky, in the second novel, recovers a balanced sense of family through her marriage to solid Jake Montano and through her return to her West Coast mother and, later, to her paralyzed father in Manila. Hagedorn apparently found a true home in her heart, rather than in Narcissus' pool—perhaps guided by her own motherly connection with two growing daughters.

As a result, her Dream Jungle (2003) ranks easily as a major work. She still manages to mock the Marcos dynasty's delusions of grandeur, but extends that diagnosis of pathology to include the self-deceptions of the culture-at-large. Just as Dogeaters exposed the self-destructive greed of Manila's privileged classes through their obsession with rapturous soap opera fantasies,3 and as The Gangster of Love exposed psychedelic dehumanization within the American rock-music scene, Hagedorn, in Dream Jungle borrows from two media events—the filming of Francis Coppola's Apocalypse Now (documented by his wife Eleanor's book Notes); and the still-problematic discovery (exploitation?) of the Tasaday tribe on Mindanao by Manuel Elizalde.4 Since Hagedorn herself is already a mistress of mixed-media, her novels must imply a conscientious examination of the difference between "true fiction" and the fictitious deceptions by image-makers at every cultural level. In Dream Jungle it is Zamora Lopez de Legazpi (read: Manda Elizalde) whose wealth conceals his principal pleasure in being Spirit Father to the Taobo (Tao po?) cave dwellers of Mindanao. As these "Stone Age" innocents become servants and less in Zamora's mansion, they are joined by Rizalina Cayabyab, pre-teen daughter of his cook and the sole survivor of a ferry disaster which claimed her father and her brothers—but can she survive Zamora?

The fantasies of playboy Zamora find a larger format —Cinemascope and Technicolor—through the production of a movie, Napalm Sunset. There is Vincent Moody, ex-child movie star who, at 26, plays a supporting role in the movie, wearing a mask of tired sweetness so that he can disconnect the brutalities of the Vietnam War with his having abandoned his girl friend and their child in California. There are also Tony Pierce who is the movie's director and his wife Janet who is making her own documentary of the entire on-scene process. Finally there is Paz Marlowe, a Philippine-American journalist freelancing for an American magazine. If none of these characters ever quite fulfill their rich potential, it may be that Hagedorn relies more than necessary on their being "stand-ins" for the more famous historic "stars" (the Coppolas; Elizalde); or that ultimately they are, by implication, truly shadowy and insubstantial rather than deliberately miniaturized by the author; or that Hagedorn is aware of her own ambivalent role as critic of the entertainment world which, whatever continent she happens to inhabit, has become her real home. The question of how to distinguish "performance" from "real life" is suggested in a variety of ways throughout the novel and may simply be a clue to any expatriate's love-hate relationship with her concertina-shaped (come-to-me, go-from-me) heritage.

Kapwa in its generic form includes but can refer to relations smaller and more intimate than the better-known term, bayanihan. In her senior year (1991) at Boston College, Kristina Casper5 wrote a Sociology term paper entitled "Culture Recovery and Maintenance in the Philippines." Seeking to find among pre-colonial tribes some essentially Filipino characteristics, she researched the Kalinga, Ifugao, Mangyan, Malitbog, Badjau, Tausug—as well as the Tasaday. Differences among these representative peoples reflect slightly different circumstances in their history and daily living. Their similarities are far more numerous, however: whatever their circumstances they live in relative isolation and on little capital, their welfare being taken care of by close family/kindred dependencies. Criteria for acceptable behavior derive from natural work units, the fruit of whose labor is shared communally: a kapwa pattern.

Writers of realistic novels have admitted to the special influence on them—more than any books which they might have read—of tales told the family cluster by parents and grandparents. Kristina's mother, Linda Velasquez Ty, has spoken often of influence on her historical novels coming from her maternal Nueva Ecijana grandmother or her wartime engineer father, and highly respected elders are common among her characters. Cecilia Manguerra Brainard similarly has revealed her father's part (he served as a guerrilla during World War II) in When the Rainbow Goddess Wept—1994 (originally entitled Song of Yvonne—1991); so too has Tess Uriza Holthe for When the Elephants Dance (2002): her father, she says, regaled her with Philippine myths and legends as well as with stories from his own childhood. The oral tradition is alive in the Philippines.

The geometric structure itself, of When the Elephants Dance, becomes a correlative for "things Filipino." During the Japanese Occupation, Filipino families often did hide in the cellars of their houses, to avoid being considered wandering guerrillas. So too do the Karangalans of Bulacan, along with their neighbors. Not only is this a typical example of kapwa, but it also can be seen as a symbol for an archipelago trying to be recognized as a single, unified nation (already proclaimed such, before World War II, by Aguinaldo as President of the Malolos Republic). The same centripetal rallying force is signified by the author's dependence on a revolving point of view, using three narrators: Alejandro and his older sister Isabelle within the cellar; and Domingo, a guerrilla commander outside. In addition to these literal dimensions, vertical and horizontal, dimensions-in-time are furnished by the stories—folk tales and personal reminiscences, with which the concealed Filipinos entertain and inspirit one another (although no single myth represents this entire panoply, as does Brainard's Yvonne's chanting of "Tuwaang, Maiden of the Buhong Sky" in When the Rainbow Goddess Wept until Yvonne becomes that magic, heroic song.

As for Brainard: earlier, in her short stories, she invented "Ubec" ("Cebu" in reverse) in acknowledgment of her birth city. In Magdalena (2002) her sense of kinship provides the novel's structure: herself pregnant, Juana decides to write the story of her mother who died in giving her birth and who therefore can be recalled only through the memories of Lola Luisa and Tia Estrella, who gradually reveal to Juana all of the family secrets including family rivalries and indiscretions. (Juana has her own secret: she is pregnant by an American pilot stationed briefly on Mactan but shot down during the Vietnam War and now a POW.)

Magdalena is moderate in length; still, its inter-family entanglements, which require the posting of an elaborate family tree, remind one of similar entanglements in the British Victorian literature of Galsworthy and Trollope (which in turn can equal the extensive personae listed in Tolstoi's epic, War and Peace). Beyond the complexity normal to compadrinazco, it is the repeated pattern of infidelity (and not the rare erotic moments touted on the book's back cover) by Victor, Esteban, Nestor, Fermin, and Ah Sin Lim which perform linkage among the various extended family subsets. Similarly it is the competition for clear dominance which provides motivational momentum, in contrast with the underdeveloped aspect of wars (Philippine-American, Korean, Vietnam: reduced to virtual sidebars) as the narrative cuts across time periods (not unlike the time switches in Hagedorn's Dream Jungle). Had all these world-shaking events been given significant attachment to the Filipino characters, Magdalena would indeed have taken on epic proportions and vibrato.

Instead Brainard seems content with the "magdalen" dimensions of her long-suffering women (more sinned against than sinning?), concentrating on that element in Philippine society rather than on the historic feminist strengths of the Filipina who traditionally has always been central to a "binary-star" system within the family, despite fictitious images of Filipinas as pitiable victims of macho spouses. If depth is sometimes lacking in individual character portraits, dramatic compensation can still be found through the sense of family interdependence expected of any extended Filipino family: for the story of Magdalena is equally the story of Tia Luisa and of Juana the narrator herself. This image of organic ingathering identity provides the resonance otherwise too often sacrificed to Brainard's quick summaries of action, substituted for natural development of literally engaging discernment of meaning.

Magdalena repeats the structural device employed earlier by Geraldine Barangan Korten's novel, Golden Rain (1996), which deconstructs the life of Mamang Isabel, as she lies dying at the age of 102 in Laoag and the far flung family comes to celebrate her birthday. A common rumor always held that, probably during one of several terrible times, gold has been securely buried somewhere in the ancestral house. But the real treasure lies in the many memories which are this matriarch's constant companions. Most of the events recounted in Golden Rain come from those recollections, through her granddaughter Maddi (Madeleine), now a nurse in New England just as Mamang was one of the Philippines' very first nurses.

Affection among the Marquez family has rarely been openly displayed, but tremulous signals pass gently across several generations; and although contrasts between their habits of living are revealed, a constant flow of family characteristics—the will to survive; to find inner strength even during disaster (such as the assassination of Mamang's husband Francisco after he gave up the governorship to serve in a presidential cabinet); a willingness to be reconciled—all these persist, like the golden shower tree itself, center of Mamang's garden. It is the richness of such details which provides ready access to the family history for all Filipino readers and also for whoever else might at first find strange the "Filipino way of life" (as Camilo Osias once called it in his 1940 book of the same title): Maddi, in fact , in postwar Germany discovered people whose image of the Philippines was represented by a nipa hut in a tree (an actual photograph once visible in a world encyclopedia!). Not only are both Mamang and Maddi nurses, but each has married a distinguished doctor. They are life-tending forces.

Mamang has lived through foreign invasion by the Spaniards, the Americans, and the Japanese: still she prefers native foods, flowers, and rattan and local woods for her house; her well-traveled husband too has always yearned to be "home," where the heart is; and even Maddi has often flown from Boston to Manila, then driven eight hours to Laoag, without complaint. A walk in the world always rediscovers the back-azimuth intuitively known to all expatriates. Grandchild Ricky and his children live in America but still feel they should have a house in the Philippines as well. When Francisco was asked by the President to pioneer Cagayan, they did go there for two years but still missed Laoag (as they probably also would have done anyway, even if he had been given an ambassadorship instead, as Mamang secretly wished.) Keaton, Maddi's mother, married Nanding Fernando, wartime guerrillero who, like Mamang, is attached to the land, which amid all the natural and battleground deaths seems most regenerative.

Such remembrances are Mamang's own part in the celebration of her centennial. Five cars begin to arrive before sunup. Although both the provincial governor and the once-governor suggested a public ceremony, Mamang decrees that a family celebration is more meaningful. She has herself carried down to the family altar. Later, she reveals where her material treasure has long been hidden, and with it the house will be renovated, then joined by other houses (and a new clinic) in a full Marquez compound, centered on her golden shower tree. All of the family relics and their born-again symbols are restored, like a code for a renewable language, never dead because remembered and repeatedly practiced. As it is practiced by Korten here, in her first attempt at semi-autobiographical true fiction.

Measuring by back-azimuth is not limited to expatriate female authors only, of course. It is true that kapwa has been described (by Dr. Felipe de Leon of UP) among Filipina amahs in Hong Kong whose one-day-off is often spent gathering at church or in shopping malls (where articles are bought to be sent home to one's parents or children), and no such known investigation of male workers in Saudi Arabia is available. But if Dr. de Leon is correct, that "The strongest social urge of the Filipino is to connect, to become one with people," the search for solace against loneliness should be gender-neutral. That likelihood is apparent in several novels by young Filipino men in America. Their "walk in the larger world" still becomes an affirmation from afar of where they have "hung their truest heart."

Brian Ascalon Roley's American Son(2001) begins with a letter from father-figure Tio Betino, a Forbes Park resident, offering to take in his nephews now living with their mother in California —especially Tomas, mestizo-bred and rapidly becoming violent, while the status of younger brother Gabe, seriously flunking math, is only worrisome. Tomas sells attack dogs to the wealthy, wears gang tattoos and shaves his head, hangs out with tough Mexican youth, and acts macho even toward his mother! Quiet Gabe helps by exercising Heinrich, half pet and half guard-dog when alerted by German commands. (The boys' father ran off to Germany several years ago, leaving the mother little control over 6'3" Tomas. Tomas likes to pretend his purebred Rottweilers have Nazi pedigrees but actually avoids buying vicious pit bulls. In fact he hates selling any dogs with whom he has a sentimental bond.) He dislikes his uncle Betino who let his wife keep the Spanish pendant and diamonds which Lola left for Tomas' mother. Once when his father, back from his station in Germany and drunk, threatened to hit his wife, Tomas knocked him flat. But the family is not as dysfunctional as their surface behavior suggests.

The mother especially loves one dog, Buster, who sleeps with her; she misses the Philippines and those who would care for her there (though she never liked the heat, the smells, and the insects, or the way she thinks that Filipinos always act rich and feed on gossip.) Short and dark herself, she is glad that Tomas can pass as a "white surfer," but worries when he laughs at illiterate Koreans or smashes the car windows of Japanese boys.

Tomas also loves Buster enough to let her see her son Johan one last time before delivering her to a movie actor in Brentwood Park. Later, changing his mind about selling Buster, he mistakes the actor's wife for their maid, then in compromise agrees to sell them Johan only. Crying quietly as he leaves, he knocks Gabe down out of frustration and kicks him in the face.

Part 2 also begins with a letter from Betino, still inviting Tomas to come away from permissive American culture to a grand life in Forbes Park. Meanwhile Gabe, having already sold Buster on his own, steals Tomas' Oldsmobile and loses his way in northern California, where the car   breaks down. After a delay caused because it is the Fourth of July weekend, he gets help from tow-truck operator Stone (whose only child is dead) who brings him to a restaurant he half-owns, where he protects Gabe from jibes from the Mexican employees. Later they drop off the car in Oregon to be fixed and nervously go to a motel—where Gabe's mother appears, having been notified by Stone. With her is Aunt Jessica, owner of a chain of lingerie boutiques. Embarassed, Gabe confuses Stone by saying his (dark) mother is actually their maid! She senses the truth, and cries.

In another letter, Betino admits that Filipinos do have problems—but also virtues; and feels proud of the fact that nonwhites are now accepted at Manila's Polo Club!

Gabe promises Tomas he will steal Buster back, for their mother's sake. Tomas however has broken into houses, to furnish their mother's bathroom with quality gadgets.   Together the boys beat up Samoan-Taiwanese Eddy Ho and smash his car window in order to steal the stash of drugs that Eddy has; and with Greta-the-dog's help, they disarm Eddy.

While their mother works in a department store's shoe section and also as a paid companion to a Jewish woman lost to hallucinations (but still insistent that America is the land of opportunity for her sons), Tomas sets fire to a house during the L. A. riots and loots television sets from the Price Club. Then their mother accidentally bumps the car of producer Ben Feinstein's mother who expects her to pay $800-worth of alleged damages (she has no car insurance). Betino writes, now offering shelter to both brothers; but their sense of comradeship is satisfied instead by their beating up young Ben Feinstein and threatening to do worse to his mother if he reports them! On their way home, the brothers touch gently—"probably something that my father used to do to both of us" as Gabe realizes.

It is this essentially durable family love/loyalty which allows a degree of comparison between Roley's novel and those of Hagedorn, otherwise structures on very different scales. American Son exposes flaws in both Filipino and American contemporary societies, just as Dogeaters and Gangster of Love and now Dream Jungle all do. Yet Hagedorn finally rediscovered the healing force of belonging to/carrying for others; and underneath the corrosive events described by Roley with killer-accuracy is the same core of kapwa: revealed through Betino's well-intentioned offer to his overseas sister; the brotherly affection between Tomas and Gabe; their high regard for and real attachment to their animals; and Gabe's agonizing sense of guilt for having demeaned his mother by publicly minimizing her social stature. Even the American tow-truck driver, Stone, who seems at first a menacing figure, turns out to be a virtuous foster-father icon instead. Roley's real achievement is that he manages to make all these positive revelations credible, in the midst of global disintegrating morality.

 

In Letters to Montgomery Clift (2002) by Noel Alumit it is also the mother-son relationship which provides depth and significance, far more than any "gay literature" connection with the late homosexual actor, Monty Cliff (dead in 1966), who once starred in The Search, as an American soldier who discovers a refugee child in Europe's postwar ruins and cares for the child until its mother can be found. (Appropriately he also played Dr. Cukrowicz in Tennessee Williams' Suddenly Last Summer who prevents a young woman from being lobotomized  for resolutely telling the truth about her cousin's bizarre death.) In Alumit's novel, the narrator Bong Bong Luwad longs to find his own mother and end his lonely life with unloving Auntie Yuna. He appeals to the spirit of Clift through imaginary letters (and happens to understand fully the symbol of the back- azimuth: "Some think time is a straight line that only continues forward…I think the line of time can be bent backward, so far back, it'll break.")   Both Bong Bong and Alumit are well aware of how the Marcos years still resonate today, both in the homeland and abroad. The image of a compassionate Clift has replaced that of the boy's murdered father. Several other men have served as "interim mothers" for Bong Bong until he finally does find his birth mother, after seeking her for twenty years in the Philippines, Hawaii, and California. In turn she has searched for him as well, having supported herself doing maid service in hotels. Indeed, her automatic reflex is to tidy his place and his clothes when they finally meet; equally instructive is the embrace which they share, each having found a fullness of self through the other.

Despite Alumit's success as a playwright ("Master of the 'Miss Universe'") his novel avoids much of the raw, shocking quality of Realuyo's The Umbrella Country. The horrors of torture under the Marcos regime, for example, are reported after the fact by someone who already has absorbed the worst part of the trauma. Through that strategy, Lettersavoids seeming melodramatic.

It is not only through novels, of course, that the Philippine expatriate can provide the sense of connection and belonging which overrides whatever distance and cultural difference intervene for the reader. A prime example of how memory and imagination meet and finally merge, creating affirmation of one's birthright from afar, is Nadine L. Sarreal's collection, Exactly Here, Exactly Now (2000). No short story by any expatriate (Sarreal now lives in Singapore) better presents the price of cultural isolation abroad, only partially offset by the fact that the true "home away from home" is in one's heart, than her "Case 2183-93 Angela Cabading, Age 26," about the physical/psychological attack on a Filipina maid in Hong Kong. (Eric Gamalinda's novel, Confessions of a Volcano—1990, dramatizes the fatal brutalization of a Filipina employed in Japan.6). What is most remarkable about each of Sarreal's stories is that, in the midst of wrenching deprivation, her characters focus on their inner self, which helps them survive intact. The book jacket says it best: "It's not only big decisions that determine people's fates, but also the moment-to-moment hanging on," successfully illustrating the pointillism implied in the work's title: exactly here, exactly now. Sarreal's rhetoric avoids both the flamboyant and the programmatic, while concentrating on the authentic moment and gesture which define the personal human condition (even while suggesting kinship/"kind" universally extended and made accessible).

Each story opens a window briefly on the interior of an individual character. In "Ivory" it is the retarded young man who nevertheless finds poignant code words to confess his infidelity; in "Rain" Karen's remembered body language is invoked and survives her; Ed, in "The Healer," confronts his limitations when it comes to ultimate pain, and can only howl. The protagonist of "Vimi in a Tree" becomes existentially naked when reduced to joining the circle of dogs eagerly hunting her. The man in "The Monkey's Uncle" abandons the narrator despite her wanting "only" that he forget his "hunchback's face" which is already "tattooed in her memory" and "simply" see and love her. Each story finds symbolic echoes, through the frantic search for pregnancy in "Exactly Here, Exactly Now" and in the resigned house hunters' sad realization, in "Lakeside," that " We can't go home either. We're always going to be knocking".

The targeted, stilled attentiveness or the movement of bodies with different velocities described in these newer novels and short story groups rarely come unexpectedly (though they still may project a "shock of recognition"). In persons with multiple heritages, regardless of which aspect or which combination these writers choose to embrace—and whether the result is immobilization or the feverish flex of a fast yo-yo (also a Filipino invention!)—the attitude expressed is recognizable: loneliness; yearning to "have it all" or guilt for not being able to share the good with those less fortunate; the realization that "being accepted' may be just another form of the conventional, irritating patron-client syndrome; the loss of a once secure, if not wholly desirable, identity because of the enormous mass of bodies competing for space, careers, recognition…

Still, however familiar the emotional matter (natural to world culture fluid from diverse immigrations), it is the concentration on craft and reliance on artistic integrity which, remarkably, provide such passionate intensity and extreme sensitivity to "the Philippine experience" in an assimilated but still "richly other" English language: describing for friendly ears the expatriate Filipino's otherwise indescribable experience.

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1 See "The Filipino Writer in the United States," Philippine Studies49 (2001): 123-29.

2 Explained in Green Circuits of the Sun: Studies in Philippine and American Literature (2002).

3 Detailed in "Bangungot and the Philippine Dream," in Sunsurfers Seen from Afar: Critical Essays 1991-1996(1996).

4 The one sacrifice of historic fact that Hagedorn makes is to place the filming in Mindanao. Actually, Apocalypse Now used three locations: the one in Iba was washed out by a typhoon; the napalm drops were made in Baler; Pagsanhan became Coppola's prime location. See my novel, The Circular Firing Squad(1999) pp. 55-6, or Eleanor Coppola's Notes (1979).

5 Now an assistant professor of Anthropology at American River Community College outside Sacramento, California.

6 The novel is analyzed in Sunsurfers Seen from Afar, pp. 47-51.

© Leonard Casper

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