Rocio Davis
introduces Growing Up Filipino: Stories for Young Adults edited by
Cecilia Manguerra Brainard
(PALH, 2003)
On the Edge: Paradigms of the Filipino and
Filipino American Bildungsroman
The process of
establishing Filipino and Filipino American subjectivities from within
—foregrounding creative imagination as a vital part of the process of
self-identification —has reached a turning point clearly resonant with the
phenomenological reality of the Filipino/American. Cecilia Manguerra Brainard’s
compilation of short stories for young adults addresses the layered complexity
of Filipino and Filipino American writing that engages the definition and the
process of growing up Filipino. This ground-breaking anthology invites the
reader to immerse him or herself into the multifariousness of the Filipino
experience, a palimpsest of races, religions, languages, customs, allegiances,
and affiliations. The intense world of childhood and the passage into adulthood
protagonizes these stories of family relationships, rites of passage,
friendships, war and loss, adolescence, romance, sexual awakening, and
immigration, disclosing the characters’ haunting insecurities and reveling in
moments of pure joy. In the contexts of traditional extended families, convent
schools, rural villages, wartime cities and towns in Manila, and cosmopolitan
settings in the United States, the protagonists of the stories undergo
processes of maturity that involve self-identification and make choices that
determine their positions. The stories repeatedly highlight diverse metaphors
of Filipino-ness, as they suggest that growing up Filipino implies negotiating
the consequences of history and family eccentricities, navigating cultural
contingencies and personal choices, and enacting individual strategies of
self-formation and self-representation.
The collection
represents the scope and diversity — and, importantly, suggests renewed
possibilities and an auspicious future — for Filipino/American writing today.
As Saul-ling C. Wong points out in her recent review of Asian American literary
anthologies, the current proliferation of specialized anthologies linked by
genre or theme may be considered "a measure of the field’s professionalization"
(237); the addition of Growing Up Filipino to the group of existing
anthologies of Filipino and Filipino American writing makes a significant
statement on the vitality of the field. The contributors to this volume —
Filipinos and Filipino Americans, established writers and emerging voices —
confirms the stimulating development and increasing maturity of Filipino and
Filipino American writing in English, as each creatively engages the shifting
ground between self and culture, questioning notions of purpose and belonging,
using humor and pathos to formulate the nuances of the Filipino personality
acting upon the world. Moreover, to publish writing by Filipinos and
Filipino Americans in the same volume stresses the continuity of Filipino writing
in English, and the emergence of mutually enhancing forms of discerning and
articulating the Filipino experience. This strategy also highlights the fluid
nature of the Filipino/Filipino American divide and allows individual writers
to dialogue with the community of voices assembled by the anthology: the
resulting polyphony offers a kaleidoscopic vision of the Filipino psyche.
The stories are driven by their writers’ attempts to organize and make
sense of personal and collective experiences that are often contradictory,
vexing, and paradoxical. They repeatedly demonstrate how Filipinos cross the
boundaries of unity and diversity to claim multiple and complementary
relationships to distinct communities, languages, and cultures. As Eric
Gamalinda points out in the introduction to another anthology of Filipino
writing, Flippin’: Filipinos on America:
Philippine writing
remains one of the most vibrant in the world, an on-going tradition that can no
longer be contained by the strictures of language or even of geography: for
Philippine literature is a complex, multifaceted, multilingual organism,
written in various dialects (and in English) in the archipelago, in Australia,
in Europe and America, by people who have never seen America, people who have
never seen the Philippines, or people who have seen one or both, but who feel
continually called upon to make sense of this unique and sometimes
flabbergasting culture. (4)
These texts confirm Gamalinda’s claim to the continuing resonance of
writing by Filipinos, in particular through the appropriation and manipulation
of metaphors specific to the Filipino/American experience. Relatives, rites of
passage, food, and language are among the most loaded metaphors. By
highlighting these metaphors, the writers construct texts that emphasize their
own awareness of the multilayered nature of Filipino-ness. In particular, for
instance, the negotiation with the languages spoken by Filipinos and Filipino
Americans becomes one of the recurring issues in many of these texts.
Because of the critical position of language as a means of self-expression and
empowerment, identifying the discursive realm as one of the terrains of
oppression or personal insecurity or as a means for agency allows writers to
successfully examine their protagonists’ process of socialization.
Brainard’s specific focus, narratives of childhood, makes this anthology
an important contribution to the field by filling a space that was clamoring
for recognition. This collection is the first anthology that focuses exclusively
on children and adolescents, and is directed towards a young adult audience. By
addressing the issues of childhood and adolescent culture, aside from ethnic
affiliation, the anthology can also speak to a wider audience. The diverse
stories demonstrate how the child archetype, one of the most recurrent themes
in many important ethnic writers, can be a powerful means of defining the
responses of a country’s artistic minds to its evolving socio-cultural climate.
Literary texts are emblematic of the structures that generate or manipulate
meanings at specific historical moments, by presenting a larger critique of
culture and ideology, of the manner in which the inscription of the experiences
of particular children bear on or illustrate the development of contemporary
societies. Texts that privilege the child character bear a special burden in
negotiating the representations of the palimpsestic societies within which they
are set. By collecting texts that span decades and cross oceans as they deal
with the representation of childhood, this anthology highlights innovative or
even subversive perceptions, approaches, and representations of the Filipino’s
necessarily transcultural identity. The stories collectively attest that the
Filipino identity is not unitary — that it is in constant flux and is subject
to being written and rewritten in literary terms. They also explore the
fragmented nature of the Filipino collective self, as they examine the limits
of history and ethnicity. The vision represented, in highly individual ways,
consistently challenges accepted versions of the child character or the form of
the child’s involvement with the world. The manner in which the child’s self is
constituted and the process of meaning, therefore, stress the child’s subjectivity,
as determined by social formations, language, and political or personal
contingencies. What is consistent across these stories is the manner in which
considerations of the figure of the child, or the child as primary audience for
the text, nuance our view of representations of society. The passage from
subject to individual becomes a central theme for many of these texts, as the
children begin to impose themselves upon the world, transforming themselves
into active participants in their stories, protagonists of their own lives.
The engagement with childhood and the contingencies of history,
ethnicity, family, and social class are highlighted by the stories’ status as bildungsroman,
the classic narrative of formation, which, as Lisa Lowe argues, is "the
primary form for narrating the development of the individual from youthful
innocence to civilized maturity, the telos of which is the reconciliation of
the individual with the social order" (98). The traditional bildungsroman
functions as a strategy for identification with the accepted social order and
value system, as it chronicles the protagonist’s assimilation of his or her
society’s values. The ethnic bildungsroman departs dramatically from the
traditional pattern, to engage the individual’s process of awareness of
particularity and difference, and the choice of identifying with or rejecting
the models society offers. The stories in this collection manifest this
singular approach: rather than merely appropriating accepted societal
perspectives, the protagonists explore the nature and predicament of the child
on the cusp of change. This renewed position postulates an identity that is
self-defined, rather than merely a product of traditional influences; it makes
reevaluation as important as learning. As such, these stories can also be read
as strategic interventions in psychological or literary constructions of
ethnicity, gender, and culture. The process of selfhood and the Filipino or
Filipino American child’s evolving subjectivity are the covert themes in much
of this fiction, and the politics of identity and self-formation find in these
writings fertile ground for discovery. The focus is on the process of becoming,
rather than on the act of being; a program that cannot be divorced from the act
of representation.
The recurring theme is evidenced in the title of the anthology: the
stories are about "growing up." Interestingly, substituting the
preposition with others multiplies meanings, and reflects some of the stories’
central concerns, while challenging conventional limitations and exploring
diverse themes and approaches. The stories in Brainard’s anthology are not only
about "growing up," but also importantly engage the process of
"growing into" Filipino-ness, "growing with" Filipinos, and
"growing in" or "growing away from" the Philippines. Two
oftentimes complementary, but sometimes oppositional, processes are enacted in
this anthology: the natural biological/psychological journey from childhood to
adolescence to adulthood; and the process of becoming Filipino, awakening to
and integrating the specificities of one’s cultural milieu or heritage. If a
literary revisitation of the time of childhood means, in a sense, re-creating
that childhood, then revisiting the complex manifestations of Filipino culture as
apprehended by a child or adolescent becomes a creative journey into identity
and self-formation.
The twenty-nine stories in the anthology are divided into five sections,
"Family," "Angst," "Friendship,"
"Love," and "Home." The first section explores a variety of
family relationships and cultural norms and expectations. Grandparents are the
focal point of several stories, such as Paula Angeles’s "Lola Sim’s
Handkerchief," where a sixteen-year-old Filipina American whose
relationship with her grandmother had soured as she became more and more
Americanized, chooses to keep only her grandmother’s handkerchief after her
death, a memento of their most harmonious moments together. In Libay Linasangan
Cantor’s "Tea and Empathy," a young girl recalls her grandmother’s
maid, who had taught her to drink tea, and understand the insidious nature of
class divisions. Veronica Montes’s "Lolo’s Bride" is a subtly
humorous story about keeping up appearances, as the narrator’s mother refuses
to accept that her recently-widowed father has actually returned to the
Philippines and come back to the US with a new, very young, wife. A young
girl’s true awakening comes in Marianne Villanueva’s "Grandmother"
when she understands her liminal position between her grandmother’s frustration
and her mother’s tragic life. The experience of a deception played on an older
relative is the theme of Ruby Enario Carlino’s "Blue Fangipanis,"
where the narrator learns that her dying Aunt Julia has been tricked by a young
man who has taken advantage of her loneliness. Complex family relationships are
explored in both Linda Ty-Casper’s war story, "In Place of Trees,"
and Gemino Abad’s urban narrative, "Houseboy." These sophisticated
stories center on young boys negotiating their family relationships, grief, and
hidden secrets. Culture shock and inadaptability to the land of heritage
characterizes Rico Siasoco’s "Deaf Mute," where an American-born boy
about to go to college visits the Philippines for the first time and meets his
family there.
The section entitled "Angst" suggests that loss, violence, and
insecurity are constituents of the process of maturity. "Voice in the
Hills," by Alfred Yuson, set in a rural village, recounts Bingo’s several
rites of passage: his circumcision, a growing awareness of the nature of
violence, and lessons in loyalty. The violent nature of the racial divide that
characterized the United States in the 1960s is the thematic center of both
Vince Gotera’s "Manny’s Climb" and Oscar Peñaranda’s "Day of the
Butterfly," where groups of boys and young men, aware of the role of their
race in their interactions with others, have to make decisions about where they
stand. The effects of violence also surface in "American Son
Epilogue," which begins where Brian Ascalon Roley’s American Son ends.
Here, the biracial adolescent Gabe negotiates the consequences of beating up a schoolboy,
the lies he’s told his mother, his brother’s imprisonment, family and religious
belief, and the hope for another chance to return to school. Albert
Florentino’s young protagonist, Annette, in "Indian-Giver," cannot
forgive God for taking her baby sister away. A mother’s acceptance and support
of her son’s sexual orientation and his need to explore the limits of this
choice is the theme of Joel Tan’s "San Prancisco."
The stories in the section entitled "Friendship" highlight the
idiosyncrasies of childhood or adolescent relationships, as well as the anguish
and insecurity children feel. The need to be part of a group, to conform rather
than to be different, becomes a driving force. Wanggo Gallanga’s "The
Purpose of Malls" is a slice-of-an-afternoon scene that reflects the
pivotal position of the mall in the performance of Filipino adolescent’s dating
rituals, as well as the evanescent nature of those attachments. Gilda
Cordero-Fernando’s "The Eye of the Needle" and Cristina Pantoja
Hidalgo’s "The Magic Glasses" focus on young girls at school, and
their efforts to belong to the group. In the first story, the narrator allows
herself to be blackmailed by another girl who threatens to tell the head nun
about an episode of the former’s "immodesty"; in the second, a girl
experiments with strategies to become popular. Edgar Poma’s story about
differences in sexual orientation is set in a migrant camp, and foregrounds the
lives of the children of these workers. Mar V. Puatu’s "It’s a Gruen"
centers on a boy’s hero-worship of an older cousin, and the young adolescent’s
typical desire to be older.
The section entitled "Love" takes some of the issues of the
previous one a step further by focusing on moments of defining relationships
for the adolescent protagonists, and revising the question of attachment and
identification. In M. Evelina Galang’s "Her Wild American Self," the
narrator recounts the story of her "wild" American-born aunt, who was
sent back to the Philippines in disgrace, stressing a bond between them. In
Cecilia Brainard’s "Last Moon-Game of Summer," the narrator crosses
the border between childhood games and adult relationships, knowing that things
will never be the same. Marily Ysip-Orosa’s "The Curfew" is the
interior monologue of a young mother who remembers dating as a young girl as
she waits up for her daughter to come home from a prom. Though she promises
herself that she will not commit the mistakes her own mother made, she finds
herself falling into the trap. Consciousness of his lack of sophistication and
his failure at speaking proper English does not prevent the protagonist of
Anthony L. Tan’s "Sweet Grapes, Sour Grapes," a village boy at
University in the city, from dreaming about a popular girl. Ruth T.
Sarreal’s experimental story interrogates a protagonist on the nuances of
relationships, and the reasons behind her choices.
The last section, "Home," focuses on specific metaphors and
experiences peculiar to Filipinos in the Philippines, that make them reflect on
attachment or being accustomed to a place. Rogelio Cruz’s "Flooded,"
captures a typical experience after a typhoon, as Fritz and Jan try to make
their way home after a flash flood in Manila. Connie Jan Maraan’s "The
Boundary" has the protagonist, a Filipina American living in the
Philippines contemplating the chasm between a Quiapo market and the sterile
environment of an American hamburger chain, and reacting violently at the
Filipino’s obsession with American goods and mimicry of American accents. Alex
Dean Bru "The Spirits of Kanlanti" is a valedictory for one of the
most important persons in a small town, the priest, told from the perspective
of a young boy who later also joins the priesthood. In M.S. Sia’s "Below
the Belt," a biracial boy’s friends come to his aid against another
classmate who makes fun of him. Poor children singing carols in the streets,
hoping for hand-outs from tourists evoke memories of his own childhood for a
Filipino immigrant to Sydney returning to Manila with his wife in Erwin
Cabuncos "I’ll be Home for Christmas".
In diverse ways, the stories in this collection dialogue with the
Ricardo M. de Ungria’s sentiments in his poem "Room For Time
Passing": "Whichever side of the ocean I’m on/ completeness will seek
me and the world exceed/ the surprises I spring on it with these same
words." Negotiating the paradigms of cultural formation and singularity,
these stories collectively identify and illuminate the metaphors writers today
use to arrive at conclusions about the nature and possibilities of childhood
within the multiple contexts of Filipino and Filipino American culture.
Questions about self-representation are answered through narratives that
articulate stories of survivors in a shifting world. The manner in which these
writers have appropriated the child character and the characteristics of the bildungsroman
as a metaphor for the fragmentation and multiplicity of transcultural lives is
itself an articulation of new awareness of subjectivity and the complex process
towards self-identification. As such, the multiple impressionistic perspectives
and formulation of the metaphors of culture emphasize possibilities of renewed
insight into contemporary Filipino and Filipino American societies and
children, engaged in the process of transformation and growth.
_______________
WORKS CITED:
WORKS CITED:
Gamalinda,
Eric. "Myth, Memory, Myopia: Or, I May Be Brown But I Hear
America
Singin’." Flippin’: Filipinos on America. Eds. Luis H.
Francia and Eric Gamalinda. New York: The Asian American Writers’ Workshop,
1996. 1-5.
Lowe,
Lisa. Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics.
Durham and London: Duke UP, 1996.
Wong,
Sau-ling Cynthia. "Navigating Asian American Panethnic Anthologies." A
Resource Guide to Asian American Literature. Eds. Sau-ling Cynthia Wong and
Stephen H. Sumida. New York: The Modern Language Association, 2001. 235-251.
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