Review of Lives Remembered: A Memoir
by Lynn M. Grow
Lives Remembered is a remarkable work of single-minded multitudinousness in which Linda Ty-Casper writes about herself while seeming to write about everyone else. Its outlook is panoramic without being kaleidoscopic because her controlling consciousness releases observations with the calibration of the one-degree gradient of an ancient Roman aqueduct, not the inundation of a drainage canal after a rainstorm. The absence of abstraction—rumination, postulation, or ambiguity-- results in the clarity of vision and intensity of focus that facilitate an impression of abundance and preclude a sense of overstocked or even crowded concrete detail. The focus of many autobiographies and memoirs does not extend beyond their respective authors, understandably enough. But as a result, though they arouse admiration for their respective authors' accomplishments and values, they offer readers little else. The scope of Linda Ty-Casper's memoir Lives Remembered, however, is expansive,1 as "Lives" suggests and the penultimate sentence emphasizes: “This memoir is about the lives of all the people who have become a part of me and made me who I am.” (172) She confirmed this commitment and extended it to all her other works in an e-mail to me of February 28th, 2025: "I always thought the writing should get the attention-- not the writer." This outgoingness is not unexpected for those who have read her immediately previous published book Will You Happen, Past the Silence, Through the Dark? Remembering Leonard Ralph Casper,2 which her "Preface" ( 1 unnumbered page) describes as the "...the memoir that Len did not get to write," rather than her own biography of her late husband. She even inscribed my copy "for Lynn M. Grow--sharing Len's Memoirs--a communion of and in and through the literature he loved." [my emphasis]
The first section of Part I of Lives Remembered, "Early Memories," is a rhapsodic reminiscence so vivid that it can be envisioned as an Amorsolo3 painting. Nowhere else in her oeuvre is there a comparable passage, drawing the reader into the scene instead of the reader simply remaining a spectator.
In Part II, the "1984 Djerrasi" section provides a mesmerizing lyrical passage with a backdrop progression from Divine to individual to societal, a passage also unmatched elsewhere in Ty-Casper's corpus:
Raining. the light over the hill is like a halo. I thought of Nanay's stories about processions. I watched the halo getting narrower, a worn wedding band like the one on her finger.... I. remember the trays of wedding bands in the Brattle Street antique shop, Cambridge... heaped like roasted cashews sold in Manila sidewalks.
Rain and a bird singing. A red madrona repeating the shape of the hills. The sun a soft moon. Olive trees in groups. Redwoods growing out of clumps cut a hundred years ago when sawmills dotted the hills. Rain running down the branches of the redwood beside the lamp post. ( 87-88)
The poetic quality of this passage lies in its makeup of the word “Raining” and then in the first paragraph a mixture of complete sentences and phrases; in the second paragraph all units are fragments. At the start of each paragraph is an allusion to the exquisite Jose Garcia Villa poem "Girl Singing. Day."
These felicities might seem redolent of a recollection like Marcel Proust's A la Recherche
du Temps Perdue because they are. Lives Remembered is a research of lost time, as Proust's title announces that his book is, but not a search for it. Ty-Casper's quest is not verbal archaeology; it is an explication of the already excavated past, which has not been lost at all.
But lying between the two rhapsodic passages of Lives Remembered is the harrowing account of "The War," the Japanese Occupation. The horrors did not stop at deprivation: "Widespread scarcity resulted after the Japanese began sending food to Japan. People were dying in the streets of Manila, bloated..." (26) Ty-Casper's relatives "told of Japanese soldiers shooting the priests and nuns in the colleges in Manila, smashing infants against the walls of the Philippine General Hospital..." ( 29) Yet Ty-Casper also relates the kindness of the Japanese houseboy, who one night "suddenly appeared at the kitchen window.... He had climbed the wall between the houses to bring a whole fish on a platter.... Days later, he cut out part of the wall, so he could just walk into our yard. Sometimes he brought candies, like tiny boiled eggs with a yellow center." (27)
The balance of good and evil that these juxtaposed recollections achieve is maintained throughout Lives Remembered. We are reminded that in ordinary life, not only in extreme situations such as wartime duress, we experience spontaneous acts of kindness but also gratuitous act of viciousness.
For the most part, the people Ty-Casper has encountered have been cordial and respectful, some going out of their way to be honest and thoughtful. A landlady she and Len had in Watertown, a Boston suburb, "... often was at the door before 6 a.m. with a plate of freshly made donuts. She and her sister Martha invited us for salmon dinners on the 4th of July." (49 ) In the Manila slum district of Tondo,4 which “had a reputation, of a place to be mugged...we were wary when the men at the corner stood up to approach the car. Without a word, they proceeded to change the tire and, after they were done, shook Len's hand but did not take the money folded in it. 'Bye, Joe,' they waved, smiling." (63 )
Similarly, when Ty-Casper's mother was seriously ill but unable to acquire the medicine she needed, “Then a knock on the door. A man said he was from the ward, heard my mother needed the medication his mother was on. 'Mother does not need it anymore. She just died. ' He refused to be paid." (144) "In Cebu, I bought a coin purse from a woman, purposely left before she could give me the change, but she looked all through the market until she found me.” (169) No wonder she can say about herself and Len "Our life has been filled with many good people," (164) especially since the anecdotes she recounts involved strangers under no obligation to help as they did.
Yet the converse has also been true. People she had never met have been hateful, rude, and nasty. "I remember in a trolley, in Cambridge, a woman stared at me and said, "Go back where you came from .... Another time in Filene's Basement, a woman pushed towards me the rack of clothes I was checking....A third time, a black woman stared at me, looking me over in a superior manner.... But these were mild forms, compared to current Asian hate..." (45) Worse was when Philippine relatives, whose kinship did create an obligation to help, did the opposite : "... Mom and Dad told me the Araneta property was for me.... When the house was sold after Dad passed, some relatives took even my share of the sale. I had sold my only lot, to cover Dad's expenses. I don't know what happened to his account." (148) "... the morning I left [Manila to return to Boston], Dad was moved to a smaller room, the window facing the wall. The people who came at night to ask for money, who stole his gun and clothes, never paid their respects." (154) Ty-Casper carefully preserves balance in tone in her accounts of human actions and attitudes, not succumbing to polemics or condemnations, though some certainly could be justified. Her prose here is even-keeled, neither exultant nor morose, consonant with the unwavering empiricism of all her works. As the pen name she adopted for some of her early short stories suggests, she is Luz De Vera ("the light of truth"), steadfastly objective. She makes no use of humor to facilitate serious viewpoints, as Carlos Bulosan so memorably and effectively did in The Laughter of My Father5 In fact, no indirection techniques at all are used.6 Here and elsewhere Ty-Casper's literal landscapes do not contain “Vain philosophy's aye-babbling spring," as Samuel Taylor Coleridge put it in his 1795 poem "The Eolian Harp." They are what our five physical sentences tell us they are, untroubled by ontological or epistemological questions. Instead, Ty-Casper presents panoramic macro world of microscopic specifics, so particularized that we realize that we are privy to the detail of each detail.
The remarkable range and degree of detail in Lives Remembered begins with "My earliest memories.... of Nanay, our grandmother, inside the Kolong Kolong [a space underneath a raised structure] reading Liwayway7 while Baby [Ty-Casper's younger sister] sat outside the playpen; of holding tightly to a bag of peanuts at the Mehan Garden8 while the elephant, its trunk high over me, waited for me to feed it.
With a blue Kodak my father took a picture of me playing piko,9 my shadow on the sidewalk; of my mother wearing a saya [skirt] instead of her usual dress, holding Baby who is watching me crying at our mother's knee; of Tio Osong Velasquez who came in a shiny new car to bring me a doll almost as big as myself when he won the sweepstakes." (1) The emphasis on time-honored Philippine tradition in these details is, of course, intentional as well as chronological. Ty-Casper promised her father that she would never relinquish her Philippine citizenship (105, 173).10 Tellingly, until very recently her prose fiction has been exclusively set in the Philippines.
Periodically in Lives Remembered there is enriching information about how she formulated and developed her prose fiction, such as the real-life origin of the plot of the short story "The Dead Well."11 ( 25) She specifies the date of composition of" The Longer Ritual"12 (60). In 1990 Ty-Casper returned to the Philippines to visit her terminally ill father. "Forty days after Dad passed, the first line of "Tides and Near Occasions of Love"13 came to me.14 by June 16th, 1990, she had returned from the Wheatland Conference and had written " Happy,"15 set in the Muir Woods. For this story she provides a plot summary: "The story is about Sausalito and the redwood trees covered by coastal fog, its tap roots reaching only thirteen feet deep, and a young woman renouncing her family roots. It ends with her looking up at the sky for the star that came to life when she was born; remembering, that her mother said that there is such a star." Ty-Casper adds that "Wheatland ('Happy') and Djerassi ('Hills, Sky and Longing') were the only two places where I wrote a story. I'm glad I went." ( 96)
A final piece of information about the origin of one of her short stories is another real- life occurrence: "From time to time, I remember the man who stood outside the door in Camarines, trembling, unable to speak or knock; my aunts afraid to let him in. He is in 'The Outside Heart'16, where a little girl gives a mute beggar her earning." (170)
These real-life events impelled Ty-Casper to write because for her writing is a form of advocacy."17 Specifically, "... when governments distract the people from the issues, literature can provide the information to combat political lies. Information in literature can empower. Literature lives on beyond its last lines." (104) Her advocacy precept initially came from a chance visit to Harvard's Widener Library, where she found "unfair and erroneous material" (71) about the Philippines. Her response was to write historical novels,18 which included focus on the biased and untrue characterization of the Philippine-American War (1898-1903) as a Filipino "insurrection" when in fact the Philippines was a sovereign nation with a duly constituted government. She also wrote seven novels/novellas about the Marcos years, making her the most prolific anti-Marcos writer.19 For particulars see the entry for her in the Greenwood Encyclopedia of Asian American Literature.
Then she explains how she set down on paper her commitment to advocacy as well as her creative writing:20 "All those activities [household tasks as well as protest actions] actually helped me write. Not focused nervously on the writing, I unconsciously processed my notes until the story or chapter was ready to be written. I never knew when: when a first sentence occurred to me in the midst of pulling weeds, cleaning the house, and other chores. I sat down to write, letting the words guide me to the end. All that was left to do was to revise, later." (59) One specific example is the temporary writer's block she experienced when setting out on her novel Awaiting Trespass:21 "... at the library [Widener] the first line... occurred to me. I couldn't get past the first paragraph, until, after lunch, back in the stacks, I chanced to describe the coffin as closed. That set the stage." (77) But when she says that "All that was left to do was revise, later," she does not mean that what follows will always flow effortlessly: "Rewriting is harder than the first draft just flowing till it's done. When the first line comes to me, I never know how it will end, how far it will go. If it will stall..." (82)
The sheer amount of detail Ty-Casper introduces into her text could well have led to a welter instead of an amalgamation, especially considering the variety of subject matter involved. For instance, the idyllic description of the wildlife visible in and out from the backyard: Len "... watched the muskrat swim by, young deer sun themselves on the lawn, wild turkeys fly from across the river; small birds nesting in the hemlocks and umbrella pine trees he had planted... Besides sparrows there were robins and cardinals, warblers, buntings, juncos, goldfinches and siskins, evening grosbeaks, scarlet tanagers, wrens and orioles, titmice, hummingbirds, woodpeckers, blackbirds with red in the wings, and the chickadees. Now and then, a bald eagle. And in the river, merganser, swans, geese and ducks, mallards, harlequin ducks, herons. Once a pheasant flew from across the river to the apple tree. A cormorant was blown inland by a storm.” (165) This population would do for a wildlife refuge and is followed up by an impressive list of plants in Ty-Casper's house and garden: "...yellow lupines, pink and white columbines, orange hot pokers to fill in the gaps in the front beds, among the pink coral bells....white coral bells... blue Russian sage, columbines, evening primrose, astilbes, monarda/beebalm, blue flax, Queen Anne's Lace, golden ladders..." (167) On pages 167-168 she lists 40 people whom she currently stays in touch with and nine neighbors who watch over her. Had Lives Remembered been a Homeric epic, these lists would constitute a catalog of the warriors, and these are only some of the much larger number of people she mentions altogether in Lives Remembered.
In between the opening and closing of Lives Remembered is a remarkable number of details so transitory as well as specific that other memoir writers probably would not have recalled or recorded them, especially considering that these details are drawn from events from a spectrum of almost 90 years. She remembers a makeshift meal at Djerrasi, 40 years before she wrote this memoir: "Snack on persimmons Tom brought. Then supper. Maiden hair squid pasta. Carolyn didn't come out till we were halfway done." (89) Perhaps because the Djerassi experience was so special, it was embedded in memory. The same might apply to her meal preparations for her husband and younger daughter before she left Boston for Manila to visit her seriously ill father in 1990: "I had baked Russian tea cookies, a chicken relleno to freeze, for Tina and Len while I was gone. I make lime pineapple cheese jello..." (93)
But the same can hardly be said about the 1993 Southeast Asia Write Award trip to Thailand: "Left LA 2:30 pm,, Thai Airlines Royal Orchid seats 9J and 9K.” (97) How many of us would, 30 some years after the fact, remember our seat numbers, even on a special occasion? I asked Ty-Casper about her extraordinary recall, and in an e-mail of February 25, 2025 she did concede that “I tend to remember people, even strangers." She did go on to say "No big deal about remembering plane seats. A friend gave me a red notebook so I would remember the days, events of the grants. I noted seats, altitudes to fill the pages." But this doesn't explain the multitude of other details on other occasions.
In sum, Ty-Casper has left no stone unturned even though she has faced the same formidable situations that Cecilia Manguera Brainard has described:23 "As a Filipino woman in America, I often feel as if I were straddling between two countries, two cultures... I married an American, had children, accumulated friends, memories and things..." (v) Lives Remembered is a book well-written about a life well-lived.
Notes
1 Santa Monica, California: PALH, 2025. "Expansive" in this context does not mean Walt Whitman's inflation of the ego, along the lines of his "Song of Myself,"a poem title reinforced by its opening line: "I Celebrate Myself..." nor does it suggest the cosmic sweep of Tantric meditation, in which the master practitioner feels coterminous with thev universe.
2 Santa Monica, California PALH, 2022. The unique title was composed by Len himself, in a love letter to to the then Linda Ty.
3 A succinct identification of this salient 20th century Filipino painter is in Eileen R Tabios' novel The Balikbayan Artist (Singapore: Random House, 2024): 87-88.
4 Familiar to readers of the prose fiction of the Bienvenido N. Santos and the acclaimed author's childhood home. In his works he labels it "Sulucan," which means "innermost corner."
5 New York: Harcourt, 1944. For more details see my article "The Laughter of My Father: A Survival Kit." MELUS 20.2 (1995): 35-46 Rptd. in L. M. Grow, And Quiet Flows the Dawn (Quezon city: Giraffe Books, 2003. 19-30
6 Making it the opposite number to Vladimir Nabokov's much beloved and revered stylistic masterpiece of autobiography Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited (New York: Putnam, 1966).
Nabokov's hypnotic, symphonic harmonies of prose and content described on the Goodreads site as "a memoir of imaginings and tangents of mind almost as of things that happened" are quintessentially indirectional, like the finely wrought ambiguities of meaning in such novels as Lolita and Pnin, arguably making Speak, Memory: as much a piece of creative writing as it is a memoir.
7 A weekly Tagalog magazine, the oldest in the Philippines, dating from 1922. "Liwayway" means "dawn."
8 An open space in Manila, established in 1858 as a botanical garden.
9 A traditional Filipino children's game similar to hopscotch.
10 Which may well explain the paucity of mention of her in writings about Filipino- American literature. In 2000 Shannon T. Leonard pointed to her very slight notice in Asian American Novelists: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook London in New Haven Bloomsbury Publishing Greenwood Imprint-374-379. She is, however, included in The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Asian American Literature , ed.Guiyoa Huang. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2009. 3 vols. v.3: 937-941.
11 In Ty-Casper, The Transparent Sun and Other Stories (Manila: Alberto S. Florentino, 1963): 40-47
12 In The Transparent Sun 56-64. Rptd. with slight revisions in Ty-Casper, Common Continent: Selected Stories ( Manila Ateneo de Manila UP, 1991): 13-20.
13 In Common Continent 198-202
14 Whether this time interval parallels the 40 days that Christ, according to a Christian Scripture, is said to have spent in the wilderness is problematic but plausible granted Ty-Casper's devout Catholicism.
15 In Ty -Casper's A River, One-Woman Deep: Stories. Santa Monica, California: PALH, 2017: 15-22 Rptd. In Growing Up Filipino 3: New Stories for Young Adults. Santa Monica, California: PALH, 2023. 289-295.
16 In Ty-Casper's, The Secret Runner and Other Stories. [Manila]: Alberto S. Florentino, 1974: 9-23. A similar, though slight import into a story from a real life is the inclusion of Ty-Casper's aunt, Tia Monang , in "Triptych for a Ruined Altar." The story is in Common Continent 143-152.
17 Manifested in actions as well as words. "People organized protests against Martial Law. With Filipino groups from other States, we held protest placards across from the White House...we were members of the Movement for Free Philippines....After Ninoy's assassination, Len and I joined protests in in the Boston area." (57) In an e-mail I asked her whether after the demise of Ferdinand Marcos, her advocacy had changed. In an e-mail to me of February 28th, 2025, she replied "I'm still writing about our Filipino story so we will not be forgotten, left to the footnotes, so we'll know who we are and are meant to be.”
18 The Peninsulars (Makati: Bookmark, 1964; The Three Cornered Sun (Quezon City: New Day, 1979; Ten Thousand Seeds Quezon City, Metro Manila: Ateneo de Manila University Press,1987; The Stranded Whale (Quezon City: Giraffe Books, 2002).
19 Nor was Ty-Casper's advocacy confined to Philippine matters. In Framingham, Massachusetts where they lived, Ty-Casper and Len were parishioners of St. Jeremiah Church. When the clergy sexual abuse scandal arose, the Cardinal closed the church buildings. Ty-Casper and Len, devout Catholics, were among those who kept vigil in order to keep the church open. They wrote to the Cardinal, who refused to meet with parishioners and sold the church for $2,000,000, using the church funds to pay for the clergy sexual abuse cases. ( 54) Ty-Casper also "joined Birthright, Nuclear Freeze, Pro-Llife, Prison Ministry." (55)
20 A more extensive account of her writing process is in How I Became a Writer: Essays by Filipino and Filipino-American Writers, collected and edited by Cecilia Manguerra Brainard. Santa Monica, California: PALH, 2025. 28-36.
21 London: Readers International, 1985 and Quezon City: New Day, 1989.
22 Especially in the absence, at least overtly, of Kapwa, succinctly defined by Eileen R. Tabios, speaking in propria persona in her novel DoveLion: a Fairy Tale for our Times [New York]: AC Books, 2021 as "...an indigenous trait of interconnection that bonds everyone and everything with everyone and everything across all of time." (21) When I asked Ty-Casper whether she had Kapwa in mind, she responded in an e-mail to me of March 21, 2025 that she had not consciously invoked it, though "...Nanay always thought of her Kapwa tao [person]. So now, thinking back, did my parents. Tia Fidela asked the street cleaners to come in from the sun, served them what she had cooked... I hope it ...survived all the corruption and calamities. [suffered by the Philippines in subsequent years] How ingrained Kapwa is in Filipino lifestyle is thoroughly discussed in Katrin De Guia, Kapwa: The Self in the Other: World views and Lifestyles of Filipino Culture-Bearers. Pasig City: Anvil, 2005.
23 In her introduction to Philippine Woman in America: Essays by Cecilia Manguerra Brainard. Quezon City: New Day, 1991: v-vi.
