The Early Short Stories of Linda Ty-Casper
By Lynn M. Grow
“...writing historical fiction had to become the special form of advocacy....This was how she chose to serve her nation...through its people... she was attempting to know herself better, too, as Filipina...”3
Another factor in her minimal presence in Filipino American literary criticism is her assessment of the status of Filipino emigrants. Despite Filipino authors' ready assimilation and richly cultural origin... such authors' books remain Filipino...4 A final, though slight, factor in Ty-Casper's being perceived as a figure in Philippine, rather than Filipino American, literature is the Tagalog basis for a number of her stories. For instance, her “Gently Unbending” from The Secret Runner and Other Stories [Manila: Alberto S. Florentino, 1974: 46-62], was self-translated from the original Tagalog manuscript.5 N.V.M. Gonzalez even urged her to translate her English stories into Tagalog.
In the Philippines, more extensive scholarly attention was paid sooner to Ty-Casper's short stories. Two articles, which Ty-Casper appended to The Secret Runner, are “Linda Ty-Casper: the Lost Eden” by Raquel Sims Zaraspe (153-162) (orig. pub. The Philippine Collegian 11 September 1968) and “Well-Wrought Gestalts” by Nilda Rimonte (163-168) (orig. pub. Heritage 1, 7 August 1967: 106-109). Such critical work, going beyond the brief book review for her short fiction, is called for, not only because of these works themselves but also to gain a full appreciation of her novels, as I pointed out in my Greenwood Encyclopedia entry. Montenegro (159),6 quoting Ty-Casper, concurs: “[...] the chapters tend to be short stories [….] “because that's the way I work.” This is borne out by the fact that Kulasyon consists of first chapters from 10 novels. It thus reads like a short story collection.
The short stories have been accurately described as “quiet” by both Francisco Arcellana7 and Cecilia Manguerra Brainard.8 They are subdued; readers move through the stories with respect, not with either joy or shock. One reason is that they feature no large-scale depictions. Instead, they offer focused detail about such matters as family interactions and the plight of small farmers facing displacement by acquisitive wealthy men and by their own aging. The scale is not as minute as Emily Dickinson's is, nor are family dynamics as narrowly concentrated as Jane Austen's are, but we do not encounter heroic action in battles nor machinations of national political officeholders. The stories are also quiet because there is no flamboyance of the sort we know from Nick Joaquin's lush, romanticized tales of the Spanish era. In Ty-Casper we find nothing remindful of the frenzy of Joaquin's “May Day Eve” or a splashy title like Tropical Gothic.9 Cf., Ty-Casper's title Common Continent. Ty-Casper's stories are also quiet because they are not strident or even insistent. They markedly contrast with works like Carlos Bulosan's America Is In the Heart (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1946) because Ty-Casper's work is steadfastly serious social realism with no serio-comic humor. Ty-Casper's stories elicit pathos; they are somber without being morose. Often with rural settings, they are proletarian but without any left-leaning political bias and decidedly without a bucolic slant to them.10 The reader will encounter no “swains on the plains” here. In fact, in “The Dead Well,” a farmer whose land has been taken by a rich man menacingly moves the man's agent toward an uncapped and unused well, into which he falls to die.11
As we might expect, Ty-Casper's stories are thoroughgoing in their empiricism, even though they are endowed with very creative figures of speech. Although at first glance this may seem like an apt characterization of the short fiction of Manuel E. Arguilla,12 the difference in tone between Arguilla and Ty-Casper is very marked. Arguilla's tales border on yarns and local color, and are invitingly picturesque. By comparison, Ty-Casper's work may seem stark, but it certainly is not barren.
Her stories have a crystal clearness of setting, characterization, and plot because there are no frills, and she meticulously crafts her fiction over extended periods of time, even to the point of evolving them from one book publication version to another. The most dramatic case in point is “In Place of Trees,” which readers initially encounter in her second story collection The Secret Runner and Other Stories (24-45). In her next collection, Common Continent: Selected Stories (1-12), it has been so extensively re-written that, though the storyline remains intact, The Secret Runnertext is virtually a progenitor. Finally, in Growing Up Filipino: Stories for Young Adults,13 the text of the story has been significantly altered from that in Common Continent, though again the storyline has been preserved. As a result, the Growing Up Filipino version should be considered the standard edition. Since at least some revisions appear in a number of other stories, my discussions reference the most recent book publication of a given story, and stories from The Transparent Sun and The Secret Runner rewritten or revised for inclusion in Common Continent or anthologies I have reserved for discussion with the later stories. I have eschewed periodical publication versions (e.g., “In Place of Trees” in the Spring, 1990 Hawaii Pacific Review) since it is unlikely that authors would have had the opportunity to examine galley proofs and make corrections.
One constant in the stories, especially the early ones, is the unhurried pace of the plot, sometimes to such a degree that a given story may border on tableau. It does not, however, produce anything like the “museum world” of Henry James or the stasis of Robert Browning's poem “The Bishop Orders His Tomb at St. Praxed's Church.” The major impression the leisurely unraveling plots produce is of intensely focused reader concentration. Attention is riveted on landscapes and characters, not diverted into keeping pace with plot twists and turns. For instance, “Gently Unbending,” a rare Ty-Casper first-person narration, is an entirely domestic story, about one compact family in one house. The opening paragraph describes the house in terms that foreshadow the condition of the characters:
“The house seemed to lean, not in any one direction, but towards wherever I stood. Neither paint nor new sashes shored it up, to keep it from looking old. The green and white tiles on the stone steps had faded and the eaves were peeling, as if the wood was becoming porous in preparation for its collapse.” (46)
The narrator's mother and father are both retired, now simply passing time rather than making constructive use of it. The narrator's father relives his childhood by burying himself in The Harvard Classics set of books. Her mother has “a certain aimlessness in the way she moved towards us...” (47) She is unrelentingly negative, especially about Tia Ana, who lives with them and does all the cooking and other household chores. But Tia Ana has a martyr complex. As the narrator explains, “Ana always looked chastised. My father said that....she had always done that to herself.” (50) For instance, “No amount of coaxing would make her eat with us....When we were all through, she would come in to eat what was left.” (50-51) And Tia Ana does wallow in self pity: “I am nothing in this house. The maids do not listen to me because I don't pay their wages. I am nothing. Nothing.” (57) There is, unfortunately, some grain of truth to this histrionic outburst. Tia Ana, at nearly 80, can no longer do the sewing at which she’d most excelled, and she doesn't get the appreciation she deserves. For example, from the narrator's older brother: “though it was Tia Ana who heated the water for his bath and had his clothes ready in the morning and gave him money for ice cream after school, he showed no particular feelings for her.” (52) In fact, each character illustrates a facet of the story's title. Each is “unbending” in the sense of “inflexible” and “unbending” in the secondary sense of “aloof and often anti social.” The pathos of the story is encapsulated in the only striking image it contains: “the golden shower tree a mass of yellow against the April sky... the petals falling, gently unbending the light.” (48) So it could have been for the story's characters. This story well exemplifies the way in which Ty-Casper's proletarian proclivity eschews political implications. Yes, the story's characters “had suffered there” (62), but their misery is self-inflicted. Like the dilapidation of their house, about which they do nothing, they do nothing for themselves or other family members. “Gently Unbending ” is among the stories that, though never reprinted, deserves to be.
“Cousin, Cousin”14 is a more obviously proletarian story, contrasting as it does the plight of the rural dispossessed with the depredations of industrialism and expanding the scope of the plot from the home of one family to a countryside. Within this countryside are both conscientious, compassionate individuals and selfish parasites. The story opens with Belen walking to her cousin Matilde's house. Belen carries with her a gift of one papaya but hopes that her better-off cousin will provide her a loan so that Belen's seriously afflicted husband, Filo, can have a life-saving surgery. Along the way “jeepneys loaded with melons and white heads of cabbage” refuse to stop and give her a ride. Instead, they raise a “barrier of dust around her. …There was no shade. As far as she could see, the ground was white with lime....gravel for construction covered the flower beds. Tractors had broken the dikes on the rice fields....as late as the last war, these fields were planted every year. Now, the land looked cracked and hard. But even where she lived, along the interior river, the land was refusing to yield....They could no longer wash clothes in the river for the steel company upstream was throwing all its refuse into the water. The fine slivers of metal cut their hands.” (80-81) Even the fruits that did grow “were bruised, smashed, because the jeepneys and buses ran wildly over the roads.” (82)
Belen seeks refuge in a roadside church, but she finds no comfort there. “...the priest was coercing [my emphasis] the people...to pay his words attention.” His words are “’We think only of our own need, never of Christ's...' (84)...She raised her head to catch sight of the Host being lifted but what she saw was the collection bag approaching, the velvet pouch the shape of the sacred heart.” (85) Ty-Casper, a devout Catholic, here and elsewhere calls out the venality and obtuseness of some practitioners of the faith, not the faith itself. Should the woman next to Belen be offering even as little as a ten-centimo coin? “It could buy four pan de sol...”15 (85), which the virtually destitute parishioners of this area could really use. Later, Belen's cousin Matilde notes that “even priests... were seen at the golf course, in the best restaurants...” (92) When Belen does reach cousin Matilde and her husband Simeon's house, she is treated to a meal of an egg left over by Matilde's spoiled son Boy, who greets Belen with “Did you bring me a gift?”(89) Matilde, though not overly generous and somewhat critical of Belen and her husband Filo, has resisted her own husband's suggestion that she dispose of her old clothes as out of style and has consistently foregone church on Sunday to help others: “Poor cousins, nephews, and nieces and former help came; sometimes bringing small fruit, out of season, small eggs, but always expecting to be given something. It was never a fair exchange” (91), yet “she felt confirmed, justified because she had more than someone else, more and better than almost anyone she knew. It was a sign of the goodness of her life, God's affirmation.” (96) Her pride does diminish the virtue of her good works, but she is the middle ground between the faultless Belen and the thieving godbrother in Congress, who now has Filo's property in his name. Filo's other holdings were lost in the war.
As the story's narrator puts it, “... her sacrifices resolved nothing, changed nothing. Was it because she did not give everything she had, did not give willingly?” (95) Yes, although it was more that Matilde does not give all that she reasonably could than that she is parsimonious overall that limits the value of what she does give: “Matilde unrolled the bills from her pocket, pulled out a five, folded it back and unrolled two peso bills instead....She compromised by adding a few coins.” (95) As a result, Belen “when she was most desperate... could not ask. It was not pride, but fear that she had asked for all that she deserved.” (94) The moral here is that charity without compassion falls short.
The next story in The Secret Runner, “Germinal (97-119), is a continuation of “Cousin, Cousin.” The characters, setting, and central motif are the same in both. But as the title suggests, here the raison d' etre for Matilde's hesitant, even reluctant, charity, is explored in detail. For her, all of reality is an incessantly red-shifting universe unstable and thus uncertain, germinal of existential angst:
“Even her thoughts lost their form and urgency. All she was certain of was flatness...” (99) The story's conclusion is emphatic in this regard. Matilde and Boy leave the river. “As she lifted her foot to climb the land, she felt the earth turn underneath.16 She stopped to listen but she was not sure, and she did not want to think and be deceived again.” (119) She ruminated that “In the end, she would be helpless and no one would even pretend to care, then.” (102) Matilde's dying mother has reassured her that “You have everything you need, Matilde,” but the third-person narrator responds “She had nothing.” (104)17
Matilde's angst, however, is not mere paranoia. Entropy is visible in both the physical and moral universe. The physical environment is dilapidated. In the macrocosm, “The land seen between the signs looked encroached upon. Where the rice used to be planted there were factories and lumberyards with high stone walls, quarries to gouge out the limestone from the earth.” (110) “The land looked tangled, choked with useless plants.” (111) “The termites in the ground would build their nests inside the new houses. That was the price of misusing the land.” (112) “The river is unsafe. There are fine metal slivers that will cut his [Boy's] feet... It's that factory.” (119) The smaller physical features are similarly dilapidated. In Matilde and Simeon's house there is “...the ceiling where the paint had faded into stains of dampness...” (97) Mice and termites nest inside the piano. (99) In the yard we see “... the bougainvilleas...their flowers, parched, fell.” (105)
The moral universe is similarly deteriorated. Filo, Belen's husband, needs surgery to prolong his life. “By right, the operation must be paid by Filo's godbrother, the one his parents raised as their own son....What about the house and the land that he had asked Filo to transfer to his name temporarily, only until he was elected and then never returned?” (101) Perfidy of one kind or another is widespread. “The maid came to take away her plate, not to perform her duties but to have her new dress noticed.” (102) “The maids helped themselves to the food, consuming what she [Matilde] intended for her final son.” (103) “... when the money was about gone, other relatives came and, helped, returned...” “The last helper refused to pump by hand, saying he had watered the plants when he had not.” (104) The department in which Simeon worked “...was re-opened so that an outsider, one who wrote speeches for politicians, now was his chief.” (108) “Who could be trusted? A friend's driver rented her car out between her own use of it; and until she was told by others, knew nothing about it.” (109) “...squatters entering that part of the river...would steal from the poor. The poor were not all generous, not all virtuous ...” Even immediate family members prove to be parasites. “It was she who paid the doctor and the hospital; her sisters came only after their mother had been admitted; and after she died, left immediately to have their black dresses sewn. It was she who sat by the bed coaxing the old woman to eat the soup of rice and chicken.” (102-103) When Matilde asks her mother for whom the money inside her pillow at home is intended, she is told that it's for whoever needs it.” (103)
“Gently Unbending,” “Cousin, Cousin,” and “Germinal,” though they were not used in succeeding Ty-Casper collections, are well worth reading. The remaining five stories in The Secret Runner—“The Outside Heart,” “In Place of Trees,” “The Secret Runner,” “A Wine for Beeswings,” and “A Wake for Child-Bearers” —were all chosen for Ty-Casper's third short story collection Common Continent and were all consequentially revised from The Secret Runnerversions so that they can be considered among the later short stories.
Although No Transparent Sun stories are also in The Secret Runner, Common Continent also includes two stories from The Transparent Sun: “Unleavened Flesh” and “The Longer Ritual.” Since no stories from either The Transparent Sun or The Secret Runner are present in Ty-Casper's fourth collection, A River, One Woman Deep: Stories, but “Unleavened Flesh” and “The Longer Ritual” are also in Common Continent, we can classify the remaining four stories in The Transparent Sun— “The Transparent Sun,” “In Time of Moulting Doves,” “The Salted Land,” and “The DeadWell” —as the last of the early short stories that Ty-Casper did not select for subsequent book publication.
“Dead Well” is the most striking of these because it is so anomalous for a Ty-Casper story. If someone did not know who wrote it, a first surmise might be Oscar Peňaranda, whose fine story “The Price” it resembles in its even tone and theme of a dispossessed farmer.18 “Dead Well” is atypical because its characters are either victims or perpetrators, unlike the population of most of the other stories, who have human faults that are at least contributing factors to their predicaments. But here Ty-Casper exacerbates the good /evil bifurcation from the actual incident on which it is based—definitive though that is—with the plot element that the conniving rich man's agent orders Mang Agusto, the protagonist, to stop trying to cut down a duhat tree on what had been Mang Agusto's own property. Mang Agusto turns to him, bolo in hand. When the agent threatens to call the police. Mang Agusto maneuvers him to the uncovered well, into which the agent falls. The well is dead in a double sense: it is dry but now is a place of death. Ironically, Mang Agusto is too old and enfeebled to even cut down the tree. Sadly, his wife, Sepa, is also decrepit, “her mouth now loose with age, her hands as meaningless as dry tree roots.” (41) Had the rich man offered a fair price, the elderly couple, now unable to work the land, would have sold it and the tragedies of displacement, loss of hope, and loss of life would never have occurred.
“The Transparent Sun,” the title story of the collection, is clearly-etched but does veer perilously near soap opera. The characters, like those in “Dead Well,” are either noble or despicable and the conflict in the plot is between right and wrong, with nothing in between. Fortunately, there is no stereotypical motif of greedy rich people and deserving poor people. Don Julio is a cultured gentleman who had originally come to his house as a servant. Sepa, the daughter of another cultured gentleman, Don Macario, once had substantial means, but due to external circumstances like the Japanese Occupation and the Sakdal Uprising, not any fault of his own, is now destitute. She has suffered greatly: She has “raised my children on peddling” (11), even selling her own sleeping mat and her husband's. Her face is “old ...more faded than the portraits on the walls.” (9) In spite of her tribulations, “She had her father's face, broad and kindly, generous with faults.” (13) The now deceased Don “had repaid him [Don Julio] with good money for a wartime debt that friends insisted could be annulled in court. Esteban had said, a debt of honor binds a man more strictly because it is the measure of his life.” (16) Gloria, Don Julio's late wife, was generous and kind to Sepa.
Zenaida is the opposite: selfish, shallow, petty, and mean. She is summed up in t:he same simile at the beginning:—"her voice clear and sharp as claws” (6) –and at the end – “Zenaida's clear voice, like sharp claws.” (15) She “spends her time brushing her fingernails, now and then glancing at the newspaper pictures of society ladies.” Her hairspray is “a special concoction of beer and essences smuggled [my emphasis] from Jolo. When Don Julio asks her to return the necklace that Sepa had pawned to him, she first responds “What necklace?” (7) and later, when he comes to get it, she locks him out of her room.19 This storyline has only a small resemblance to Guy De Maupassant”s “The Necklace” (1884), insufficient, especially considering the moral compass of each story, to attribute to it inspiration for Ty-Casper's tale. A more compelling parallelism (though not an inspiration) might be the “Celtic Twilight” movement of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries with its atmospheric nostalgia for departed grandeur. Here, the Hispanic presence, though idealized to some degree, is far more muted than the “Celtic Twilight” literary works and nothing like the almost deliquescent atmospheric shadings of elegance, sophistication, and rectitude of Nick Joaquin's idyls.
In “The Transparent Sun” the honorific “Don” is used admiringly, not in any sense carrying the sinister connotations of an Italian mafia don. Don Julio reads a Spanish language newspaper, as “se ruega no envie flores” (“please don't send flowers”) in the obituary section makes evident. His house is decorated with portraits, including one of Don Julio as a young man and another “huge” wedding portrait, reminders of the importance family lineage has in Spanish culture. The admirable character of Don Macario exemplifies the Peninsular ideal. “It was not his wealth, but the richness, the perfection of his devotion, his attending to the smallest...” (12) according to Sepa.
The meaning of the title “The Transparent Sun,” however, is elusive. It surely can't mean that the sun itself is see-through. It makes no more sense to contrast it to “translucent” or “transcendent.” The sun is often used in Ty-Casper stories to accompany descriptions of hot, baked or dried—even desiccated land. The “The Transparent Sun” uses it to depict Zenaida's cat: “a ball of petulant sun...” (5) then Zenaida herself: ”... through the transparent drapes the sun glared into her arms. The necklace leaves in the air “the flaring trace of sun...” (9). There is “...the glint of sunlight on the waxed floor.” (10) The necklace, in a portrait of Sepa's older sister on the wall, is “reproduced in tempting shades of gold like a ritual sun simultaneously buried and being unearthed.”(13) The sun seems to have a talismanic quality, but of what is indeterminate.
“In Time of Moulting Doves” is a touching story of two children, ages 9 and 16, who, with their parents, visit the father's home town in Samar. They are treated to lavish hospitality. On their arrival, after experiencing seasickness on the inter-island ferry boat, they sit down to six welcome dinners from their relatives, featuring foot-long crabs, large shrimp, boiled milk-fish, and leche flan. The girls are treated to boating and singing in the fields and, though “old people's talk never ended, and their hands felt like turtles,” all seems festive enough. Then the mood changes markedly. Lisa, the older girl, visits a shed behind the church where, on a table, a skull lies. Now “worms of fear crawled down her legs and left her sticking to the ground.” (23) When she returns to the churchyard after going past the “slope of crosses” (24) —the graveyard—an aunt asks “Did you fall into the open graves?” Then Lisa “entered the room where wailing made even the gas-lights quiver. On the bed was a dead old woman” (24), her father's Lola. Lisa is traumatized: “She would never look at a dead person again....She could smell the odor of death like thickened wax.” (25) That night she feels that “Darkness was staring in at the window.” (27) She whispers, as her father had earlier, “Lola, Lola.” (27) Like life itself, what started out as a peaceful, and picturesque, journey turns into a frightening wake. Troubling though it may be, “In Time of Moulting Doves” is, at bottom a somber ubi sunt reminder, no less compelling than the very different stories of Francisco Arcellana.20
“The Salted Land” is something of an outlier. It has a slow-moving plot consisting of a few different contexts related to each other only by the protagonist Tsip Fornesa's presence in them, all within the confines of San Martin Hospital, which previously had been the convent La Casa. At its entrance Julian, who is on the verge of retirement, is directing traffic. Tsip has two years to go before retirement, but he, now a grandfather, has already shown signs of the passing years: “La Casa was aging him; when he wiped his face dry, sometimes his skin looked lizard green.” (31) Age came one hour at a time.” (32) Similarly, La Casa's custodian has “sucked in cheeks, like a held breath.” (33) This is hardly surprising since age and aging constitute such a dominant motif in Ty-Casper's short stories as a whole. Also unsurprising is that La Casa is also aging, as its signs of dilapidation signify. Pecto “...closed half the chapel door to retard the fading of statues.” (34) Throughout the building, “The red tiles were faded up to the very edge. A trickle of rust ran down the drain spout” (32) and “The moving sun poured straight into the dry, rusting fountain spout”; throughout is “...the damp sight of cracked, water stained floors from stale rain water and dripping eaves and chipped walls...” (33)
The losses of human aging and building dilapidation sometimes spur renovation efforts that, ironically, lead to yet greater damage. An unnamed, important looking man arrives in a grey car and insists that the painters re-doing the site's walls must stop painting over the old portraits hanging on the hospital's walls because
… those portraits on the walls are, may be of value. They could be two hundred years old, maybe even more. They certainly are better than the ones I saw at an old convent in Sevilla and later, in Valencia. You see, look at the distinctive strokes... the display of colors... and if they are proved to be made by Filipinos..[.] think of the important clue to our history hidden in this old building. (37)
The putative audience for this declaration is several house painters who are afraid they will lose their jobs if they don't continue covering over these portraits; Pecto, a custodian; and Tsip, a policeman. None of them is likely to be well-educated, yet “Tsip looked back, with new eyes, upon the portraits, history's signature scrawled on the walls...” (37) In fact this is Ty-Casper, speaking through a character, but in propia persona, and the readers of the story are the intended audience. From this alone, it is easy to see why Ty-Casper, though living in the U.S. for nearly 70 years, has retained her Philippine citizenship. She is patriotic, valuing Philippine history and culture.
Yet “The Salted Land” is not anything like a wooden, inartistic polemic. A reader is taken by the creative use of striking figures of speech and introduction of concrete, atmospheric details, including liberal salting in of Tagalog expressions.
The opening sentence of the “The Salted Land” features synesthesia: “The early noise of engines sloshed out of his ears...” (28) Then metaphor presents La Casa as “The aging convent that had molted now into dank offices and supply rooms...” and personification announces that “...a spread out acacia tree fumbled into the bell tower of the chapel.” (29) Ty-Casper invests figures of speech with tactility to enhance their specificity: “Tsip barely rubbed these everyday matters with his eyes” (29) ; “...the custodian's throaty deep laugh that scraped the old stucco walls...” (30) The degree of innovation of Ty-Casper's figurative descriptions—e.g. “looked scrimpingly” (35) —is easy to miss because of the empiricism of the stories, often more specifically manifested than Hemingway's or Arguilla's.
Hemingway, like Arguilla, provide a distinct, concrete sense of place. However, in the former's For Whom the Bell Tolls or the latter's How My Brother Leon Brought Home a Wife and Other Stories (Manila: Philippine Book Guild, 1940), the focus is wider because the plots require more geographical scope than Ty-Casper's do. Instead of settings of a country or even a city, Ty-Casper's tales chiefly unfold within a neighborhood or even a building and its grounds, as “The Salted Land” does. This facilitates the narrower detail-of-a-detail approach. For instance, “The convent's shape was a swastika, like twisted sun rays21 [my emphasis] (29). The simile gilds the swastika image; most writers probably would not have added it to “swastika.” Again, “The passageway would finally be painted carburo-white.” 22 (31) Not just white, but carburo-white. Again, Tsip “...saw a uniformed man with deep-set eyes, like a Bombay, caught in the swell of people peering into the unpainted walls.” (38-39) The “deep-set eyes” might be a standalone feature, but “like a Bombay” distinguishes these particular eyes, “caught in the swell of people” contextualizes the image, and “peering into [not “at”] the unpainted walls” specifies the intensity of the people's gazes.
Another technique used throughout Ty-Casper's stories to maintain specificity is the introduction of Tagalog expressions. Doing so, even in cases which an English expression would serve as well, keeps the Philippine locale in readers' consciousness and emphasizes its importance. The English-only reader usually is not significantly distracted or denied access to meaning or ability to appreciate the quality of the stories, due to the judiciousness with which Tagalog is introduced. The bilingual reader benefits from enriched character and setting credibility. Even in a scene like the arrival of the unnamed man in the barong23 in “The Salted Land,” the fact that he arrives by chauffeured limousine announces that he is someone important. So when he says “Sandali po lang,” no one is likely to be unduly puzzled when the painters “...were embarrassed at having an important man use 'po' with them.”24 (36) In places like this, a Tagalog expression is more redolent than an English equivalent would be. Ty-Casper carefully guards against overdoing the infusion of Philippine languages, however. In “In Time of Moulting Doves,” (20) set in Samar, the third-person narrator says of Lisa, “They knew she couldn't understand Visayan,” (20) a perfect explanation for not expecting the story's readers to do so either. The few non-English terms are not Visayan specific but they are significant in the story, for instance “sineguelas” (the Spanish plum) (17), beloved in the Philippines, is used as ironic foreshadowing here. It is normally associated with happy moments and nostalgia, but awaiting the girls on the inter-island ferry is a funeral, preceded by Lisa's frightening visit to see the dead woman laid out on a bed. Traumatized, she echos her father's earlier lament: “Lola, Lola...Lola.” (27) Though “Lola” is, in the Philippines, an affectionate or honorific term to describe a grandmother, its Spanish meaning is also “sorrows,” a very subtly appropriate conclusion to this story.
Confining the setting to one restricted space—La Casa—is a method of bringing the techniques of the theater to “The Salted Land.” In fact, its nearly static, tableau-like plot would conduce nicely to stage adaptation. It has in the three girls scrabbling for scrap firewood a tailor-made chorus, and at least some of the paragraphs enclosed in parentheses could be asides.25 As a production note, the story's concluding sentence “In the courtyard noon had broken its light against the wall” (39) would do well. Although Ty-Casper has never published a play, material like this would certainly facilitate staging one.
In sum, the early stories are clearly not apprentice work. They are the finished products of a fecund mind fully committed to the mantra announced early and often: “If a country's history is its biography, its literature is its autobiography.” Both halves of this conditional proposition are validated through Ty-Casper's novels, novelas, short stories, literary criticism, and memoirs. In her short stories, she is able to distill to quintessence Philippine experience, values, and beliefs because the stories are unencumbered by decoration and unweighted from abstraction. They are populated largely by common people, in whom veracity largely resides.
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Notes
1 In Asian American Novelists: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook. London and New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, Greenwood Imprint, 2000. 374-379.
2 She is, however, included in The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Asian American Literature, ed. Guiyoa Huang. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2009, V. 3: 937-941.
3 “In the Basilica of the Luminous Dove Descending.” In Leonard Casper, Sunsurfers Seen From Afar: Critical Essays 1991-1996. Pasig City: Anvil, 1996. 107-112. Orig pub. as the introduction to Linda Ty-Casper, Kulasyon: Uninterrupted Vigils. Quezon City: Giraffe Books, 1995.
4 Linda Ty-Casper, “Re-interpretation of the American Dream.” Our Own Voice December 2005: 4 unnumbered pages. The Wayback Machine-https://web. archive. org/web 20150911/http.oourag.com 80/reader/reader20. Even her very occasional forays into literary criticism are distinctively Philippine, not Filipino American. Cf., her review of the short story collection Utos ng Hari at Iba Pang Kwento by Jun Cruz Reyes (Quezon City: New Day, 1981) in Pilipinas June 3, 1983. She notes that “the locale of these stories is Looban... an interior where people are caged by poverty and the absence of opportunities,” an exclusively Philippine setting.
5 It is unknown how many other stories have Tagalog initial manuscript versions or how many Tagalog stories exist only in manuscript form, unpublished. A number of stories, as Ty-Casper mentioned to me in an e-mail of October 22, 2024, do have Tagalog originals, and some stories remain printed only in their original appearances in such periodicals as Kislap, Graphic, Manila Times, and This Week. Ty-Casper recalls the titles of four of them: “The Unborn,” “A Portion of Hills,” “White Shadows at Noon,” and “1000 Scorching Suns” but has been unable to locate them or manuscripts of others.
6 David Montenegro. “Linda Ty-Casper.” In Points of Departure: International Writers on Writing and Politics. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991. 149-171.
7 “Foreword” to Common Continent: Selected Stories. Manila: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1991. 2 unnumbered pages. Interestingly, Arcellana's own stories feature soothing, even hypnotic prose and have a sacramental element to them. A fuller explanation may be found in my article “ Ubi Sunt: Francisco Arcellana's Sacrament of Death.” Pilipinas 23 (1994): 73-80. Rptd. in L.M. Grow, Distillation & Essence: World View in Modern Philippine Literature. Quezon City: Giraffe Books, 2002. 147-156.
8 “Linda Ty-Casper, Master Storyteller.” Positively Filipino 19 March 2019. 8 unnumbered pages.
9 St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1972. “May Day Eve” is on pp. 98-108.
10 Nor any other ideology. In Leonard Casper's phrase about another writer, she is “imprisoned by no ism.”
11 In Ty-Casper's first short story collection The Transparent Sun and Other Stories. Manila: Albert S. Florentino, 1963. 40-47. The part about the legalized theft of the farmer's land is taken from an actual occurrence, as Ty-Casper notes on p. 23 in her reminiscence Lives Remembered: A Memoir. Santa Monica, CA: PALH, 2024.
12 Elaboration of this stance is available in my article “The External World Of Manuel E.Arguilla; Landscape and Orientation.” Pilipinas 11 (Fall, 1988): 49-70. Rptd. in Distillation & Essence 1-29.
13 Ed. Cecilia Manguerra Brainard. V. 1 Of 3 vols. Santa Monica, CA: PALH. V.1 (2003): 27-36. V. 2 (2010). V. 3 (2023). Not only is this the most recent print version, but the work of Brainard is as meticulous as Ty-Casper's is. Cf., her anthology co-edited by Marilyn Ysip Orosa, A La Carte: Food & Fiction. Manila: Anvil, 2007. Brainard ranks with Leopoldo Y. Yabes as a collector and editor of quality literary work.
14In The Secret Runner, pp. 80-96.
15 A sweet, pillowy bread that is a food staple in the Philippines.
16 This is the opposite of the almost comically hyperbolic love-making scene in Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) that, for his protagonists, the earth moved out and away from them, an affirmative climax in more than one way.
17 The world-view expressed here is reminiscent of that in Edith Tiempo's short story collection Abide, Joshua and Other Stories. Manila: Alberto S. Florentino, 1964. A detailed discussion of this point appears in my article “The Architecture of the Interior : Angst and Nada in the Fiction of Edith L. Tiempo.” University of Windsor Review 22.2 (1989): 78-94. Rptd. in Distillation & Essence, 115-130.
18 Readily accessible in Growing Up Filipino, V. 2: 122-138.
19 That they have separate bedrooms is telling. That Don Julio is a half century older than Zenaida no doubt has a bearing on this plot twist. He calls her “hija” (daughter) affectionately, but this practice is also a diminutive when applied to an adult. Sprinkled into the story are other reminders of Don Julio's age. When he reads a newspaper, he always turns to the obituaries first to see which of his friends has died. He struggles to walk, and “his wrinkled feet slid in and out of his purple slippers when he walked.” (8) “Don Julio raised a hand loose with flesh.” (9) Unfortunately, Don Julio inadvertently describes himself when he says of the necklace that it “is old anyway. Old and tarnished... of what use can it be to you?” (7) He has “frayed eyes.” (9) Sepa is also elderly . She has an “old face more faded than the portraits on the walls.” (9) Throughout the Ty-Casper oeuvre, age and aging are
major motifs, not just for their own sakes, but also, as is especially conspicuous in “Dead Well,” for plot development and characterization.
20 For elaboration on Arcellana's approach, see my article “Memento Mori: Death as Incantation” in Philippine Quarterly of Culture and Society 18 (1990): 33-38. Rptd. in Distillation & Essence 157-163.
21 No insidious connotation appears to be present here, especially since the swastika was the European Nazi symbol but not that of the Japanese Imperialists; the rising sun was of course their symbol.
22 A watery paint, powder mixed with water, for outside walls.
23 A long-sleeved, embroidered shirt worn in the Philippines for formal occasions. Even the material is indigenous: sheer, hand-woven fabric sewn from pineapple, abacá, or banana fibers.
24 “Sandali lang” means “just a moment”; “po” is used to address someone elder or in a position of authority. The painters, of course, qualify on neither basis; hence their discomfiture.
25 Though the technique appears in other Ty-Casper short stories as well.
Lynn M. Grow is Emeritus Senior Professor of English, Broward College, Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. He received all his degrees from The University of Southern California: B.A., English and Philosophy, 1967; M.A., English, 1968; Ph.D., English, 1971; M.A. Philosophy, 1972.
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