PETER BACHO: AN ESSAY ON LIFE, PLACE, AND THE ARC OF SEVEN BOOKS

Peter Bacho: An Essay on Life, Place, and the Arc of Seven Books

By Alex S. Fabros, Jr.

 

Peter Reme Bacho has been a steadfast voice in Filipino American letters for more than three decades, charting lives that move between Seattle’s working-class neighborhoods and the transpacific histories that shaped them. His breakout debut, Cebu (1991), won the American Book Award and placed him among the writers who helped define the contemporary canon of Filipino American fiction. [1] Trained as a journalist and long active as a teacher, Bacho’s prose marries street-level observation to moral clarity; he writes with the punch-combination directness of a fighter and the historian’s knack for the textures of place. [2]

 

Born and raised in Seattle, Bacho grew up on the stories of an older Pinoy generation—cannery workers, union men, and war veterans—whose grit and humor thread his fiction and essays. He has described writing as a way to keep faith with those forebears, to carry their voices forward when a city’s official narratives overlook them. [16] His years at the University of Washington and later on the faculties at UW Tacoma and Evergreen Tacoma positioned him as a craftsman-teacher who treated sentences like tools and neighborhoods like archives. [3] That vantage point—local, loyal, unsentimental—runs through everything he’s published, from the novels to the stories, the boxing book to the late-career memoir.

In Cebu, the novel that launched him, a Filipino American priest named Ben Lucero travels to the Philippines to bury his mother and confronts a homeland he knows mostly through inheritance and myth. The journey bends inward and outward at once: the demands of faith intersect with the realities of power, poverty, and history; the priest’s doubts and awakenings rhyme with a country finding its way out of dictatorship. Critics have long noted how the book refuses a nostalgic “return.” Ben is not a lost son reclaiming an uncomplicated origin; he is an American whose conscience must account for colonial memory without reducing the Philippines to a backdrop. [5] The power of the novel comes from its refusal to sermonize. It lets the friction of encounter do the ethical work, which is why Cebu sits comfortably in syllabi beside Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart and Hagedorn’s Dogeaters—as a hinge text about diaspora, responsibility, and the danger of easy romance. [1]

 

If Cebu examines conscience abroad, Dark Blue Suit and Other Stories turns the lens home. The linked stories follow a narrator and his circle from Seattle boyhood into the bruising lessons of adulthood. The “dark blue suit” is both aspiration and armor, a thing a kid puts on to face a city that doesn’t expect much of him. Bacho’s sentences walk like his characters: head-up, wary, funny. Jokes protect dignity; bravado hides hurts; friendships test the limits of loyalty. The book’s recognition within Washington’s own literary institutions mattered not only because it validated Filipino Seattle but because it confirmed Bacho’s method: to name a place faithfully is to love it without denial. [18] The stories feel meticulously local—the Central Area, Beacon Hill, Rainier Valley—but their emotional climate is recognizable in any city where kids learn how to carry pride while ducking institutional blows.

 

Between those two books, Bacho laid bare his love of craft in another arena altogether: the fight game. Boxing in Black and White is a cultural education disguised as sports writing. He reconstructs classic heavyweight bouts—from Jack Johnson’s performances against white supremacy through Joe Louis’s burden of representation to Ali’s art of refusal—to show how the ring becomes a stage where American mythology and prejudice collide. The history is kinetic, the set pieces tightly reported, but the stakes are moral. Fighters labor under rules they did not write; decisions get made in back rooms; crowds roar for violence and nobility at once. In other words, boxing is America in miniature—a parable of spectacle and survival that runs in parallel to the canonical Filipino American story of labor, migration, and visibility. [19] When Bacho writes a good combination, you can hear his fiction behind it: timing, economy, the necessary humility of footwork.

 

His novels of the early 2000s push in darker, caustic directions without abandoning those concerns. Nelson’s Run follows the feckless son of wealthy American parents through a South American odyssey where class privilege and political fantasy turn intimate choices into collateral damage. Bacho’s humor bites, but the book’s center of gravity is ethical: What debt do we owe to other people’s histories? What happens when Americans treat other countries as mirrors for their own myths? The answer, in Bacho’s hands, is never neat. Satire exposes vanity, but he keeps an eye on the ordinary people who must live with the fallout of someone else’s misread script. [11] With Entrys, he comes home again, but to a different frontier: Rico Divina—Indigenous Filipino, Yakama, and Vietnam veteran—carries the war’s residue into the Northwest’s everyday geographies of reservation land, cannery shifts, and Seattle apartments. The novel is Bacho’s most sustained exploration of trauma and inheritance, tracing how tribal and Filipino lineages intersect in a body that has fought for a nation ambivalent about honoring its debts. [12] If Dark Blue Suit is about how young men learn hardness without losing the capacity for tenderness, Entrys is about how middle age learns to tell the truth about fury.

 

Even when he writes for younger readers, Bacho refuses simplification. Leaving Yesler centers Bobby, a mixed-race teen (Puerto Rican and Black) in 1968 Seattle, who has lost a mother to cancer and a brother to Vietnam. The narrative follows him through a year of leaving the Yesler Terrace projects, translating a stepfather’s Filipino discipline into his own code, and discovering that attention—really seeing people—is not just a writer’s gift but a survival skill. [13] The book extends the Bacho universe to a new audience without sanding down its edges: grief is real, swagger is a mask, and love often looks like the quiet work of showing up. [14]

 

All of these threads—Seattle as moral geography, sport as parable, diaspora as argument with the self—come to rest, and then rise again, in Uncle Rico’s Encore: Mostly True Stories of Filipino Seattle. It is a memoir in essays that reads like a manifesto of gratitude. The pieces move through kitchens and union halls, taxis and schoolyards; they return to the Central Area, Beacon Hill, and Rainier Valley not as postcard neighborhoods, but as working archives of Filipino American life. The voice is affectionate and unsentimental; the jokes are often the record’s way of protecting dignity. Bacho writes as a son of a family, of a city, of a “Pinoy generation” that fought hard and taught harder. [20] The book’s argument is simple and radical: if you do not write down the names of the men who iced their hands after cannery shifts, or the women who held families together across layoffs and evictions, then the city gets to forget them. Memory is a civic act. [15]

 

Read as a whole, Bacho’s work offers a durable answer to a question that shadows much Filipino American writing: How do we carry a transpacific past without being trapped by it? [17] Cebu refuses to romanticize return; Dark Blue Suit builds a local canon out of ordinary brilliance; Entrys and Leaving Yesler insist that war and grief must be narrated from the ground up; Boxing in Black and White presses the lesson that performance and pain are often coded by race and sold back to us as entertainment. The two outliers in tone—Nelson’s Run and parts of Entrys—do not break the pattern; they prove it, showing how easily spectacle, violence, and privilege cohabit when history is treated as scenery. [17]

 

Bacho’s sentences do their work quietly. They are built for clarity and timing, less interested in baroque flourish than in the honest cadence of spoken life. That restraint allows the moral dramas to stand where they should: in the choices characters make when they are cornered by money, memory, or masculinity. It also explains why his books are easily adopted into classrooms and book groups. Readers recognize the stakes; they know the kind of father whose love is discipline, the kind of friend whose joke is a shield, the kind of city that asks you to forget your elders so it can raise your rent. The awards—American Book Award for Cebu, the Governor’s Writers Award, and the Murray Morgan Prize for Dark Blue Suit—function less like crowns than like civic receipts: Seattle and the Northwest have been seen, and they have seen themselves. [21]

 

As a teacher, Bacho extended that seeing. At UW Tacoma and Evergreen Tacoma, he mentored writers who were trying to write themselves and their blocks into the record, and he modeled an ethic of attention that had little patience for literary fashion and endless patience for revision. [3] His public conversations—in libraries, museums, community centers—connected the book world to the neighborhoods that furnished it. [10] That is perhaps the most durable lesson of his career: literature is a local practice with transpacific consequences. You write what you know, not because the map ends there, but because the map begins there.

 

The late-style grace of Uncle Rico’s Encore shows a writer paying debts and passing on tools. He catalogs the tempos of a city many of his readers no longer recognize, not to lament change but to insist that the old rhythms are still legible if we refuse amnesia. He honors elders without sanctifying them. He insists that a joke, properly told, can carry a census of the living and the dead. And he closes the circle without closing the questions: What becomes of working-class immigrant neighborhoods in the era of redevelopment? What do sons owe to fighters and union men and veterans who built worlds out of long odds? How does a writer honor place while telling the truth about its segregation? Bacho’s answer—seven books long—is fidelity: to sentence and street, to gym and church, to the difficult love of home.

 

What stands at the end of that arc is not a monument but a method. Learn where you stand. Listen for the old stories. Keep your jab sharp. Teach the next kid to do the same. If Filipino American literature has sometimes been asked to choose between cosmopolitan sheen and local grit, Bacho declines the premise. He writes from the corner of the ring where the bell sounds the same for everyone, and he invites his readers to watch closely. In that close watching lies the antidote to forgetting, and the promise that a city—and a people—can be named whole.

 

 

 

________

Endnotes :

[1] “Cebu (novel),” University of Washington Press edition details and overview; American Book Award (1992) noted in multiple references, including Wikipedia’s “Cebu (novel)” page and UW Magazine retrospective.

[2] Alex Tizon, “Peter Bacho Writes for the Same Reason He Fights—to Keep a Connection to His Past,” The Seattle Times, March 1, 1998 (archived).

[3] “Peter Bacho,” History News Network (Robin Lindley interview), September 2, 2022, noting his teaching at The Evergreen State College (Tacoma) and earlier at the University of Washington.

[4] UW Magazine, “Peter Bacho shows his love for Seattle with ‘Uncle Rico’s Encore,’” February 23, 2023; identifies Uncle Rico’s Encore as his seventh book and reprises Cebu’s American Book Award.

[5] “Cebu (novel),” Wikipedia, for critical positioning of the book within Filipino American literature (with citations to Oscar V. Campomanes and others), and publication data.

[6] University of Washington Press, Dark Blue Suit and Other Stories catalog page (publication details).

[7] Washington Secretary of State, “Governor’s Writers Day Awards at the Washington State Library, 1966–2000,” listing Dark Blue Suit and Other Stories (1998 award).

[8] Asian American / Asian Research Institute (CUNY), author page for Peter Bacho, noting the Murray Morgan Prize and Washington State Governor’s Writers Award for Dark Blue Suit.

[9] UW Tacoma Digital Commons, “Boxing in Black and White” description (overview of historical fights and thematic emphasis).

[10] San Francisco Public Library event page (“Author: Peter Bacho in conversation”) summarizes major awards for Cebu, Dark Blue Suit, and the reception for Boxing in Black and White.

[11] AbeBooks product listing and Goodreads overview for Nelson’s Run (plot summary and satirical framing).

[12] University of Hawai‘I Press, Entries catalog page (plot and thematic description: Indipino veteran, trauma, Northwest setting).

[13] UW Tacoma Digital Commons, “Leaving Yesler” overview (1968 Seattle, mixed-race protagonist, family losses).

[14] BookDragon (Smithsonian APAC), “Leaving Yesler by Peter Bacho + Author Interview,” confirming awards context and career overview.

[15] University of Washington Press, Uncle Rico’s Encore catalog page; Wing Luke Museum shop listing, emphasizing Filipino Seattle.

[16] History News Network (Robin Lindley), interview with Bacho on Uncle Rico’s Encore, exploring the concept of “Pinoy generation” toughness and community.

[17] Consolidated discussion: for claims spanning Cebu, Boxing in Black and White, Nelson’s Run, and Entrys, see nn. 5, 9, 11, 12.

[18] Consolidated recognition note: for Dark Blue Suit’s awards and institutional context, see nn. 6–8.

[19] Consolidated boxing note: for fight history and public programming context, see nn. 9–10.

[20] Consolidated memoir note: for Uncle Rico’s Encore and authorial stance, see nn. 15–16 (and 4 for career framing).

[21] Consolidated awards note: for Cebu and Dark Blue Suit distinctions, see nn. 1, 7–8.

 

 

*****

Alex S. Fabros, Jr. is a historian and writer specializing in Filipino American history and the multiracial communities of California’s Chinatowns. A combat Marine veteran and longtime educator, he has contributed to public-history and documentary projects—including work tied to Delano Manongs and PBS’s Asian Americans—and completed the dissertation Settlements on the Outskirts of Anglo Conformity: Fresno’s Chinatown, California, 1872–1965. His publications span social history, biography, and creative nonfiction, and he advocates for community archives and intergenerational storytelling.