The Late-Career Short Stories of Linda Ty-Casper
By Lynn M. Grow
The first of Linda Ty-Casper's late-career short stories, “In Place of Trees,” was initially published in her second collection, The Secret Runner and Other Stories [Manila:] Albert S. Florentino, 1974: 24-45.1 The story is set in the immediate aftermath of the Japanese Occupation, a context inviting comparison with Manuel A. Viray's “Verdict”2 in that both involve the legal and moral determination of just outcomes for people's actions during the Occupation itself. “In Place of Trees” is a richly textured tale of post-war travail, narrated primarily by Fermin, a 13-year-old boy who lives with his mother and two sisters: Alicia (age 11) and Anita (age 12). The father, Antonio, has gone to Porac3 to save the coconut trees his parents, who died in the war, left him, and so is only referenced in the story. The narrative becomes polyphonous, however, as details are interspersed in it by other characters.
At the outset, a man and a woman come to visit. They turn out to be Stella and Miguel, Fermin's aunt and uncle. Fermin does not recognize them, perhaps because of how shabbily they are dressed: “She was wearing native canvas shoes, the kind being distributed by American relief agencies.
Too big for her and obviously similarly acquired, her dress was a heavy black cloth beaded in front and at the pockets.” He is attired no better: “The sleeves of his khaki jacket–surplus American Army uniforms were being peddled on the sidewalk–reached halfway down his stubby fingers.” (27) But their recollections reconstruct the pre-war state of Fermin's family home. For instance, they mention the trees that once grew in the yard: the kamachile, the mabolo(actually it was a paradise tree with sweet pulpy fruit”–28), and the guava.4
These trees figure prominently in the plot. The mother has chopped them down during the Occupation because there was a shortage of firewood, and people were sneaking into their yard at night to cut branches from them. The mother has bundled them for sale so that she can salvage something from their loss. Ironically, her son Justo is killed by shrapnel that the trees, had they remained, would have intercepted. Her son is buried on the side of the house: “She had placed no cross on the mounded earth so the authorities, unaware of the grave, would not order my brother to be moved from our yard. I realized then, that it was not I, nor my sisters, who kept my mother in that house.” At the time of the shrapnel–producing attack “She held my brother until his wound no longer bled....my father took Justo from her, and with my help, buried him in place of the trees.” (35)
Stella and Miguel have come to persuade the mother to let them rent a room to process claims for recognition of military service and reparation for it by the U.S. Army, even though Antonio has no intention of seeking recompense for his boys: “My sons died for their country....I will not ask America for money!” (33) Among those who do come to file claims is a man who faints in the yard. He suffers from chills, the result of being in the infamous Death March to Capas. The narrator's mother makes him ginger tea and loans him a blanket. He so grateful that in the yard he plants Bermuda grass, ironically, granted Justo's fate, sourced from the Chinese Cemetery. Like the grass, the flowers in the mother's garden are symbolically significant: rosals, sampaguita, azucena, and pitmini.5
At first, Miguel's offer of 30 pesos a month to rent the front porch, not even a room, seems a Godsend to the narrator's mother.6 But, though a good number of men come to fill out the paperwork necessary to receive reparations, the arrangement quickly ends. Miguel is unable to convince the U.S. army of his own service, much less honor the claims of the other men he represents. Fraudsters have beaten him to the punch, and now the U.S. authorities are wary of any further applications.
The first story in A River, One Woman Deep: Stories7 is “Happy.”8 The title does not refer to the protagonist, however; it is the name she has given to the radio in her apartment. She does not pursue happiness: “She is all she wants, with her own apartment and birdbath.” In fact, if her outlook on life were more positive, she could be taken for someone taking to heart the opening lyric of the Beatles' 1966 song “Tomorrow Never Knows”: “Turn off your mind, relax, and float downstream.” She is apparently so laid back that “She thinks of going to Muir Woods, But she never goes.” (15) Her job in a Sausalito craft shop allows her to “... stand besides vases smaller than herself....Stand almost without moving, without blinking; someone posing for the light...9 (16) When she interviewed with Barbara, the craft shop owner, for the position, she was even dressed like a 1966 flower child10: “She went to the shop in a long cotton cape with bright yellows and greens, strange windows on a purple field.” But even in her off time “...she sits all day by her window, watching boats that appear anchored with concrete bottoms to Sausalito Bay...” (17) This stasis is the perfect example of Nilda Rimonte's observation about Ty-Casper in her “Introduction” to A River that in the plot of much of her fiction...often nothing, or very little, seems to happen.” (9)
The main reason for this stasis is that she has moved to Sausalito a year after her parents were killed in a car accident and is still traumatized by that event.11 She could also be committed to the precept that Henry David Thoreau famously stated in the first chapter of Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854): “A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone,” which became a rallying cry for the 1960's hippy movement call to “tune in and drop out” of the establishment rat race and, sometimes via psychedelics and expanded consciousness, pursue a counterculture lifestyle, such an artsy-crafty occupation like clerking in Barbara's vase shop. Velvet does imagine “Fog running along the coast like faint capillaries of color on the tender vases Barbara fires.” (17)
But this simile does not describe artsy-crafty work. It is a far cry from an excrescence like the “poetry” in Rod McKuen's Listen to the Warm (1967) or the napkin scribblings of “the poet from Mill Valley” who presented to Velvet, written on a napkin, a “poem” with the lines “White Bird”12 in her head / peach fuzz between / breasts...” (21), in which presumably the slash separating “between” and “breasts” is meant to visually emphasize the degree of separation. No one is likely to equate this with Wordsworth's technique of isolating “alone” in his memorable lines from Book III of ThePrelude about Isaac Newton: “The marble index of a mind for ever / Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone.”
Another reason for Velvet's stasis may be, as the third-person narration observes, she is “very ethnic,” yet “on her dark skin people see cultures in collision, coalescence.” (16) The oxymoron “collision; coalescence” sums it up. The normal uncertainty that the transition from late adolescence to full adulthood brings is amped up not only by being a Filipina in the U.S., but also because “It's only been months since she moved to Sausalito from the barrio [ethnic neighborhood] in San Francisco.” (15) The attire she wears to work reflects more collision than coalescence, as does the vagueness of her response to customers who ask her where she shops: “Here and there...” “Some days she wears tartans, the badge of clans in Scotland where she has never been.” “Some days she wears a saya [skirt] with butterfly sleeves;13 other days unrelieved white, like white-on-white paintings, with a Tausug14 belt of many beads, and bells from Mindanao.” (16) The sartorial and geographical amalgamation is accompanied by historical recollection: “her great grandfather...jumped ship when he saw her great grandmother passing by the Luneta, along Manila Bay, in a two wheeled quelis.15 Long ago in memory not hers. Why ever mention her cousin in Metro Manila who trains pigeons to race?” Velvet is trying to sort all this out, but the undifferentiated flow of all this cultural multiplicity is related in the stream of consciousness narration: “she is weeding out all memories from her life, fighting them when they come unbidden while she stands, darker than bark of redwood, shimmering inside a caftan16 beside a vase slashed across by stones that mimic riverbeds dried out by summer.” (17) In terms of stasis / fluidity, the vases, as we have seen, play a part, not just symbolically, but thematically as well, in this story: “All of Barbara's vases have names. Saragh17 is radish-white with purple veins. Anglo nude, Velvet calls it, which personalizes the symbolic significance. Along the same esoteric lines, the allusion to Henry Moore18 is instructive. At the end of the story, Velvet's sense of self and place has not become viscous. When she accepts the offer of going out for a drink with Stanley, who crates vases for shipment, she has already given her two-week notice to Barbara, drinks a Campari (an Italian aperitif, yet one more intercultural element in her life), and gives Stanley her mother's ring so he can buy a car. This is an offload of her ethnic heritage, a diminution, not a clarification, of her personhood.19
The next A River story, “Celery, Tulips, and Hummingbirds”20 is in the running for most unexpected Ty-Casper short story title in this collection.21 The story itself is also unexpected for the reader of the early and mid-career stories. The empiricism and intensity of these earlier pieces has yielded place to the dreamy, almost trance-like meditative mode that dispenses with point A to point B plot direction. The story's opening encapsulates the plot's drift: “There was no pattern to his coming.” The story simply begins in medias res and then squirts this way and that. The first-person narrator, initially a child and later a young adult, is not unreliable, but she is indeterminate, unsure about details that we ordinarily would expect a Ty-Casper narrator to present with certainty. The story opens with Alan (later identified as her paternal uncle) “simply appeared at the porch door.” (23) From where we don't know. The narrator says “I don't recall22 knowing what he himself did, except vaguely that he taught somewhere on the West Coast—it could have been Seattle; San Diego; or Los Angeles. He has been in Costa Rica and in the Army overseas.” (24) Even out of her childhood she acknowledges that she feels lost: “I wish. I don't know what to wish.” (28) “I thought of going to New York to work at the U.N. while drifting, drifting, waiting.” (26) She is beset by more questions than answers. When she considers the possibility of seeing Alan at Coronado Island, she asks herself, “Has he been there? Will he be there when I am? Where is he?” (29) The concrete details that she is certain of are not always discernibly relevant to the story. For instance, apropos of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poem Evangeline (1847), she reminds us that when Evangeline and Gabriel passed each other on the road, “That was when the English drove the Arcadians out of Canada down to Louisiana.” (29) While the missed connection of Gabriel and Evangeline corresponds, in Aline's mind, to the unsuccessful attempts to see Alan, the displacement of the Arcadians by the English has no counterpart in “Celery, Tulips and Hummingbirds.” Again, along with carefully chosen details that evoke the German cultural nexus of the family, why does Aline's father mix himself a distinctively U.S, drink, a Manhattan? (24) Why not a Black Forest Martini or a German Mule? The explanation is credible: “Father liked Manhattans.” (23) But why wouldn't he equally like, say a Rhineland Spritz?
After all, the predominant ambiance in the story is Teutonic. The family's surname, “Herding,” is a German patronymic derived from an ancient German personal name. On weekends the narrator's father plays sheep’s head23 with his friends. As they play, they drink beer and eat bratwursts. The narrator, who graduated from Marymount College with a B. S. in Philosophy, learned German at home from her father, read Goethe25 in German and lined her bookshelf with Kant and Shilling.26
Intellectually, then, Aline lives up to her name, which means, among other possibilities, “noble woman” or “bright”/“shining,” She is “bright” in the sense of her quality of mind as well as “noble” in her character. She is lost, yes, but, ironically adrift at least partially because of her intellect, not for the same primary reason that Velvet is in “Happy”: cultural fusion leading to confusion. Secondarily, both characters suffer from the existential predicament: uncertainty about life's meaning, purpose, and our place in the world. Aline's intellect intensifies the primary cause of her existential predicament: her name. The story's last sentence, appropriately isolated as a paragraph, is: “For some reason Mother gave me his [Alan's] name.”(30). Not quite, but close enough to trigger her questioning of it, especially since in French the names would not only look close to identical but be nearly homonyms as well. One possibility–though it would be less remote had the story been authored by Vladimir Nabokov–is that “Aline” is here not only a feminine given name but also a variant spelling, as the American Heritage desk dictionary confirms that it is, in general, of “align.” This possibility is consonant with the storyline because the second meaning of “align” is “to adjust...to produce a proper relationship or condition.” Although the near homonym with “Alan” disappears, the prospect of Aline extricating herself at least partially from her existential predicament by proper alignment with Alan now appears, though at the potential peril of a split personality. If Alan is the masculine half of the feminine half Aline, the quest for resolution of the predicament becomes a search for the united self. This goal is more likely achievable than is the alter ego dissociation of the narrator in “Mulch.”27
“Hills, Sky and Longing,”28 the next A River story, also has a three– component title that, appropriately, both distinguishes and aggregates the major elements of the plot. The third-person omniscient narrator never mentions the protagonist's name, though we are told that her husband is John, her children are Edit and Lara, and her friend is Rosalie. The descriptions of the hills and the sky reveal the visual acuity of the protagonist: “She looks up at the larch and the redwoods growing in pairs out of the dead stumps; at the reindeer moss caught between gnarled branches of live oak, then across the open sky where red-tailed hawks, miles apart but overlapped from where she stands, are clinging to the air...”
This bucolic perception, somewhere between a John Clare landscape painting and a John James Audobon notebook entry, next presents one ominous detail, “a dark spot in the sky...” Though the protagonist never realizes what it represents, she is puzzled by it, but she turns to “the break in the soft descent of hills...she recalls the hills about Manila... the wide areas of surf [in the Pacific Ocean] made gentle by distance...” (31) She thinks of Peet's Store, a retail location known for its craft coffee and tea. This thought triggers a fond memory of “the dark taste of cafe barako 29 from Batangas30 which her father used to drink.” (30) She thinks “with much longing—an almost mourning; words without song–of mango trees whose flowering she has not seen these many years...mango trees in her parents' yard with butterflies as large as her hand...among the green fruits, yellow flowers on acacias and narras being released slowly by the sky.” (32-33) As this nostalgic rumination continues, she asks herself, “Why did she not speak to them [her two children, Edit and Lara] in her mother's songs or tell them of her father's porch screened with bougainvilleas, of her aunt's garden where the moon grew large, then small over the ginger plants, the petals wet with the night's soft fragrance?” (33) The reader is transported by the dreamy, mesmerizing, imagery in the slowly flowing seamless syntax of these passages.
Abruptly, however, the somnolent near stasis so elaborately woven into the narrative tapestry is shattered: “Life is change and loss one day; the next, more change and loss; and ache.” (34) We are now startled by our unavoidable realization that the underlying theme of this passage is mutability. As the Youngbloods' 1967 song “Get Together” so memorably put it, “We are but a moment's sunlight / Fading in the grass.” Neither of the protagonist's children will have children: “Edit will have none of her own to interrupt her painting, wants no children...Lara had that miscarriage that shocked her womb into closing,” (33) The only continuation of our physical selves is our offspring, since an element of ourselves survives in them, so without offspring, physical annihilation is our inevitable fate. But for the protagonist, darkness will descend before death does. The dark spot she sees in the sky is not, as she thinks, a peregrine falcon; it is in her own eye.31 She has mentioned the “speck” to Dr. Cavers,32 whom her friend Rosalie has introduced her to. Rosalie claims “he's a real doctor—M.D.—but decided to practice homeopathy.”33 (37)
As she drives back home, the protagonist treats herself to comfort food—Coors beer, John Fifield Chablis wine34 as well as bread crisps and cheese, but these only remind her of the Philippines' more savory delights. She envisions “rice cakes, talangka and buro,35 ordinary treats that matter more with each impenitent year.” (38) She appreciates the beauty of the redwood forest the road passes through, but in the process “remembers as a child the zigzag to Baguio”36 where she recalls “leis of everlasting.” (39) Ominously yet plangently, her thought dies out depleted, as she will. All this beauty, culinary and optical, on both sides of the Pacific—though more intensely on the latter shore for her—will pass away. There will be no continuation of the beauty encased in her memories. Daughter Edit is a painter of “horses and hills,” but there is “Nothing ethnic about it...nothing Filipino.” In fact, “Like John, The children laugh when people attempt to say, Dimalanta.”37 (41)
Next in A River is “Sometimes My Body Remembers Singing.”38 This short narrative is more vignette than fully constituted story. The first person narrator is a psychologically aberrant mother who admits to herself at the story's conclusion, “I never learned how to live inside another person and keep on singing.” She claims that “I wanted to be tender and kind, and could only be heartless.” (47) She proves that “my tongue could be sharp enough to cut sunlight...,Again and again I told her she would never have a friend, would never grow up beautiful, would never be a mommy because she was bad.” The effect on the five-year old girl is predictable: :she turned and said the same things to her doll, hitting it against a chair slowly, pulling it apart...until it became a heap of dissimilar parts.” (44) Bad as the verbal abuse is, the mother's actions are, if anything, worse: “Morning after morning I would lace her shoes and button her dress in back; then suddenly without any reason or excuse I would abandon her to clothe herself...while she shivered and cried because the [school] bus had stopped for her, had waited, had gone...” (45) It is far too infrequent when the narrator's body does remember singing.
“Application for A Small Life”39 is a return to the traditional Ty-Casper story with plot movement; its title hearkens back to Common Continent's “Small Lives” in the same way that A River, One-Woman Deep: Stories evokes the Common Continent story “One Man Deep,”40 in which the “One Man” is the moral barometer for the actions of the characters in the story. “Application” Starts out as an encomium to the beauty and joy of life: “The rightness and goodness of our lives were in those days, which would have been our dream had we not already begun living them.” At the heart of this idyll is “Dennis Durham... an infant of eight months.” He was fat then, and cheerful and beautiful... like a specimen tree growing apart, conspicuously assured, in a garden... affirming both Kurt and me, and our way of life.” (49) The narrator and her husband Kurt are both writers: “We both believed that the written word had a fullness and rights of its own, that we were creating something that never existed before...” (50) “And valuing small lives, we applied for grants that allowed us no luxuries...” Their lifestyle is Thoreau like: “Living simply, we survived on cottage cheese, grapes and tuna...” (51) She and Kurt have a second child, Fern. At seven months “She was a good, beautiful child who never cried; the source of our joy. People often stopped to smile at her, to ask her name. All the brightness of the world was in her face.”41 (53) A periodic contribution to the undiluted euphoria of the lives of Kurt and the narrator is a drive to the summit of Mount Greylock.42 The narrator recalls one visit when she was “...so fixed in my happiness that there were no distances between us. I remember the trees shaking with light, bending it and turning it, lifting it and stirring while I ran between them, so happy that I felt I was rising, climbing without effort, clutches of dried grass flowering in my hand; floating, while their laughter and mine joined and, joining, became as quiet as fish moving the water on a windless lake.” (50) “The trees were lovely, going up, the snow-white birches golden with leaves about ready to fall like blossoms and blow all over the valleys.” (53) Could an ancient Greek rhapsodist or a 12th Century French or Italian troubadour have put it more ecstatically?
But the serpent in this Edenic “Garden of Earthly Delights” to purloin the title of Joyce Carol Oates' 1967 novel, is a human failing: Kurt's reckless driving up the mountain's road. Fern was in the back seat, “lying between English woolen blankets rolled to keep her from sliding when Kurt took those sharp turns to the top.” (53) The blankets shift, smothering the infant, and the sharpness of the curves is not the cause of this tragedy: “...Kurt took the curves to the top recklessly, speeding tempestuously...” (54) The result is that their now adult son “is lured by wilderness, trapping fur in Saskatchewan or burying oil pipe lines in Alaska. Kurt is in Sausalito, living in a commune he supports with his poetry readings and his royalties.” (55-56) Ironically, the third of his five books of poetry, Songs for a Dead Child, the narrator thinks is best. But Kurt has been lethal. Spiritually he has annihilated his wife as well as physically annihilated his child. The narrator ends the story with “I write, watching the words come out with no connection to my thoughts, no possible connection to anything, like a body [hers] waiting to be claimed and shipped.”43 (56-57) She is engulfed by the darkness of a beloved one's death that descends as totally as it does in The Rolling Stones' 1966 song “Paint It, Black”:
It's not easy facing up
When your whole world is black.
….........
I could not foresee this thing
Happening to you.
The narrator's application for a small life is hereby denied.
“After the Tinker,”44 in contrast, is ruminative, calm and quiet. It moves at a leisurely pace, in keeping with its warm, homey ambiance. Set in Massachusetts, it has an Our Town Thornton Wilder45 feel to it, an engaging neo-nostalgic portrayal of Americana redux.46 An odd allusion is injected into the penultimate paragraph, however: “Sometimes My Body Remembers Singing.”47 Aside from this aside, the story's even-keeled narration unfolds seamlessly, with a tonal effect that would arise from an amalgamation of “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain” and Sense and Sensibility.48 Much of the narrative consists of rhetorical, often self-admonishing, questions about the past, as well as pellucid but only partial recall of people and activities like going to The Spa for a turkey sandwich. As the narrator says, near story's end, “Thirty minutes I have been running inside myself....” (72) The narrator finds herself feeling that, as Socrates did, “The unexamined life is not worth living” but at the same time realizes that the fully examined life cannot be lived.
The final story in A River is “Where Unburied the Fig Tree Lies.”49 Because of its usual prolific fruit production, the fig tree symbolizes abundance, fecundity, and prosperity. The irony in this story starts with the family's fig tree's paltry production: “Five were sometimes all it bore. Never more than ten.” (78) And the fecundity is a two-edged sword. The narrator is one of thirteen children, but five were stillborn. The fig tree's symbolic abundant prosperity is nowhere to be found either. The narrator's family survives only by practicing austerity. In their home's root cellar “...father and mother made wine for the table...” (76) They raise a pig and free range chickens. The grandmother sews her own clothes by hand and washes her dresses in rainwater. The father makes blankets from the stems of blueberries that grow on the other side of the railroad tracks. The children sneak into the nearby garment factory grounds to gather cones discarded because too little thread is left on them to use in the machines. Grandmother knits socks with waste thread, and she patches worn socks. When the pregnant mother senses that delivery is imminent, she rushes home from her factory job, drags a mattress outside, and scrubs it.
Although the positive connotations of the fig tree appear only in ironic, reversed form in this story, the negative connotation is equally reversed. In a Christian context the fig tree can carry the sense of loss of innocence. In the Garden of Eden, after eating the forbidden fruit, Adam and Eve cover their now recognized nakedness with fig leaves.50 However, in “Unburied the Fig Tree Lies” there is no disobedience to Divine command. In fact, the family members are more put upon than anything else. Their maternal grandparents are refugees from “the black-shirt years before the war,”51 (77) and the paternal grandfather is also an Italian immigrant who buries every Fall the fig tree he has smuggled in from Italy, so that it will flourish the following year; hence the wistfulness of the story's title. The unburied fig tree also stands as a stark reflection of the five stillborn children, who are buried outside the cemetery walls because of course they couldn't be baptized and therefore could not be buried in hallowed ground.52 It is noteworthy that burying a fig tree is a very labor-intensive process. Especially due to its frequency of mention in the story, however, the fig tree well may stand for the Biblical Tree of Life.53
The somber, even lugubrious material in the story is accompanied by positive, sometimes even lighthearted moments. One that has both qualities is the family's return from a trip to Italy. When the boat docks in New York, the customs inspector asks the father to unlock the trunk he has brought with him. He responds “O, my dear God. I left the key at Aunt Louise.” The customs inspector lets the trunk pass rather then insisting that the father break it open, saying “You look like and honest man.” The father then “placed the full width of his hand below his heart. Actually where his spleen was.” (77-78) When he gets home, he opens the trunk and pulls out the apples and pears that he has illicitly secreted there.54 The mother of the narrator's friend Hanny “had a pastry shop. The Cardinal would go to the backroom to ask her to splash more rum on the rum cake.” (81) Does this enhance some sacramental act? More likely it reflects a very human craving. When the narrator gets married, “the curate... performed the ceremony because the pastor had gone to the Boston College-Holy Cross football game.” (82) Was attendance at this game a pastoral function? All this is heartwarming rather than being critical disapproval. No one in the story is consumed with desire for more or better. The narrator rests content, as did her parents: “Ambition never caused them problems. What they had was good enough.” (79)
The stories in A River, especially, affirm that for Ty-Casper, unlike for the family in “Where Unburied the Fig Tree Lies,” what she had beforehand was not enough, though what she had already done was beyond good. While retaining, in more muted, subtle form, the empiricism that cast the hot sun and bright sunlight on the people and occurrences in the Philippines, she has gradually transitioned to U.S. settings and non-Filipino characters, a very successful adaptation that has further enriched the range and depth of her oeuvre. Unfortunately for both Philippine and American literature, as Ty-Casper told me in an e-mail of August 21, 2025, “I decided that Lives Remembered 55 is my last publication.” We can be very grateful, however, for the large body of writing, especially prose fiction, that we already have. It is a monumental contribution to Filipino literature, across the diaspora.
______________
Notes
1 This anomaly is the result of Ty-Casper's life-long practice of rewriting –in this case very extensively–short stories for later republication. “In Place of Trees” is the leadoff story in her third collection, Common Continent: Selected Stories (Manila: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1991): 1-12. However, it differs significantly from The Secret Runner version. When the story reappeared in Growing UpFilipino: Stories for Young Adults (v.1 of 3 vols. Santa Monica, California: PALH, 2003: 27-36), it had been so much overhauled that the Growing Up Filipino text must be considered the standard edition. This is especially true because the editor, Cecilia Manguerra Brainard, is is the foremost publisher of Filipino books, scrupulous about textual accuracy as well as critical judgment about the quality of the material she accepts.
The standing of “In Place of Trees” is confirmed by its history of reprinting over a period of nearly 30 years. Its historical context, nicely elaborated by Brainard on p. 26, adds to its impact. The enduring appeal and worth of other Ty-Casper stories have been validated by prestigious awards. For instance, “Tides and Near Occasions of Love” (Common Continent 198-202; orig. pub. Philippine Graphic 27 August 1990). It won the 1993 Philippine P. E.N. Short Story prize; the 1993 SEA Write award in Bangkok, Thailand; and a prize at the UNESCO International Writers' Day, London, England (Brainard 26). The story, so powerful, is so brief that, as Ty-Casper reminded me in an e-mail of July 25, 2025, it was read on the BBC.
2 Pages 44-51 in Viray's Shawl from Kashmir and Other Stories. Quezon City: New Day, 1992.
3 A landlocked municipality in Pampanga Province known for its cultural history and the scenic beauty of its surroundings, as well as for the economic importance of coconut farming.
4 Each of which could have provided much-needed food during the scarcity of almost everything during the Occupation and in its immediate aftermath. The kamachile (Manila Tamarand) has a fruit of sweet and sour pulp. The mabolo (velvet apple or velvet persimmon) bears an edible fruit, as does the guava.
5A rosal is a rosebush or rose tree; sampaguita is of course the national flower whose sweet-smelling white flowers symbolize purity, fidelity, and hope; a pitmini is a rose symbolizing love and affection and a reminder that small things can have large impact. The azucena, the Madonna Lily, is a white flower that in Christianity is symbolic of purity, innocence, and chastity. Granted the context, the secondary use of azucena as a euphemism for the illegal dog meat trade is obviously inoperative here.
6 It is nearly impossible, granted large and often rapid fluctuations in currency inflation / deflation and cost of living over the years, to accurately calculate the buying power of 30 pesos in 1945, but this amount certainly would have been substantial.
7 Santa Monica, California: PALH, 2017.
8 On pages 15-22 of A River. Orig. pub. The Southern Review 1992 : 139-144; rptd. in Philippine Studies 43; New Writing from the Philippines, ed. Emmanuel Torres, 1995: 354-358 and in Growing Up Filipino 3 (2003): 287-295.
9 As much as this description calls up memories of John Keats' poem “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (1819), the significant distinguishing feature is the depiction of “wild ecstasy” in the ode: “What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?...For ever panting...” (lines 9 and 27) In contrast, in “Happy” the vases are “edged with pumice, pink stoneware throats flesh like, quietly alive. (15)
10 At this point, she appears to be almost a poster girl for a Scott McKenzie “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair”) (1967) song reprise. Even the name that the protagonist adopts for herself—Velvet—is redolent, in its soft tactility, of the “gentle people with flowers in their hair” about which McKenzie sings.
11 A similar plot stasis, for the same reason, is exemplified in Ty-Casper's mid-career story “Small Lives,” on pages 152-165 of Common Continent. The story originally appeared in the Cuyahoga Review Fall 1985 / Winter 1986. As Ty-Casper states directly about “Happy” in Growing Up Filipino 3: “Velvet tries to forget her parents' death in a car accident.” The story was written in 1990, and Ty-Casper's own father “had just passed away after weeks in the hospital.” (288)
12 The lyrics of “White Bird,” a popular song written in 1967, are about a bird growing old, longing to fly, to be free of its imprisoning cage. “White Bird” could be an oblique application to Velvet, but if so it is a stretch, and it is hardly in the same class as the work of a composer like Robert Zimmerman (nom de plume Bob Dylan) or Paul Simon. Mill Valley did be- come a haven for notable Beat poets like Gary Snyder in the 1960's.
13 Probably a less formal combination than the traditional baro't (barot at saya), literally “blouse and skirt,” which combines elements from both the precolonial Filipino and colonial Spanish styles, but the cultural
amalgamation here certainly fits the collision / coalescence motif.
14 An Islamic ethnic group, primarily in the Sulu Archipelago. The name means “people of the current,” reflecting the Tausug maritime prowess, especially in recognition of the strong currents surrounding the southern islands like Jolo.
15 In the Philippines a quelis was a small, square, two–wheeled trap with the driver in front and seating for four inside. Today “quelis” is likely to be thought a Mallorcan or Mediterranean style whole wheat biscuit known for its crunchy texture and distinctive flavor, but the identical spelling of the two items is purely etymological coincidence.
16 A cotton or silk ankle-length, long-sleeved garment, worn by men (which is why it is not a skirt) and now mostly by women in the Middle East. Velvet’s cultural pluralities are again augmented here. The lyrics “darker than the bark” of the redwoods evokes the natural beauty of the Muir Woods; “shimmering” means a tremulous or flickering light that contrasts with the unmoving redwood trees and the vase that Velvet is standing beside; now Velvet must also try to reconcile Heraclitean movement and Parmenidean permanence.
17 “Saragh” is a first name of Gaelic origin and is gender–neutral, but in its Sanksript origin, meaning “a bee,” it is feminine.
18 An English visual artist (1898–1986) most known for his semi–abstract bronze sculptures. Again, “semi-abstract” and “bronze sculptures” combine to create a tiptoe effect between stasis and movement.
19 As Ty-Casper notes, “the stories Pinoys exchange in the U.S. [are efforts] to know who they are.” In the next sentence, she answers her own question: “we are our memories… Hopefully this will help her recover / discover who she is.” Ty-Casper then casts a wider net around the loss that, hopefully, will one day be recovered: “The story is about loss—of family; and also of country: the assassination of Ninoy, the People Power Revolution...” (Growing Up Filipino 3 (288). Whether Velvet will discover / recover her identity, however, remains to be seen: the story ends with suspension points.
20 On pages 23-30 in A River. Orig.pub. A Rainbow Feast: New Asian Stories, ed. Mohammad A. Quayum. Singapore and Tarrytown New York: Marshall Cavedish, 2010: 319-328.
21 Though three others are strong candidates: “Hills, Sky, and Longing,” “Sometimes My Body Remembers Singing,” and Where Unburied the Fig Tree Lies.”
22 Time after time the narrator expresses uncertainty and/or memory lapse about the information she presents: e.g., “I don't think hummingbirds ever did come, actually.” “I don't recall any return address on the packages...” (25)
23 A trick-taking card game popular in the U.S. Midwest, especially Wisconsin, derived from the German game Schafklopf. Using a 32-card deck, the game involves partnering among the players, most commonly five, but it can be played by as few as three and as many as five. The game has nothing to do with the North Atlantic food fish of the same name.
24 Marymount College in San Diego closed permanently on August 31st, 2022, but it was still operational when A River was published. The undergraduate philosophy degree at Marymount was actually a B.A. rather than a B.S., but the latter enhances the irony of the narrator's self-acknowledged “drifting, drifting, waiting.” (26) A philosophy B.S. degree program focuses on science, mathematics, and logic or scientific reasoning, thereby rewarding empirical, ontological exactness, not drifting, hesitant uncertainty. The philosophy B. A. degree program emphasizes the humanities (e.g., history and foreign languages). The latter emphasis would seem to be a better fit for Aline.
25 Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749-1832) was an iconic German polymath. As a playwright he is best known for Faust, but in addition to being a poet, novelist, and critic, he was also a scientist.
26 Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) was at the forefront of Transcendental Idealism. Friedrich Schilling (1868-1950) was a seminal figure of the mid-point of German Idealism, the central tenet of which is that reality is fundamentally mental or spiritual. As Oliver Johnson puts it in The Individual and the Universe: An Introduction to Philosophy (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1981): “philosophers of this persuasion believe it is possible to reduce physical nature to the content of our experience.” (75) Philosophy professors are fond of pointing out that this school of thought would be more aptly termed if it were “Idea-ism.”
27 In Common Continent, pages 166-172. Orig. pub. Prairie Schooner, Fall 1977. In “Mulch” both the narrator and the alter ego are feminine, but they are two distinct selves, not two halves of the same self, one half masculine and the other half feminine, as they may be here.
28 On pages 31-41. Orig. pub. In Home to Stay, Asian-American Women's Fiction, ed. Sylvia Watanabe and Carol Bruchac. New York: Greenfield Review Press, 1990: 222-231; In Power and Grace: FestSchrift for Edna Zapata Manlapaz. Manila: Ateneo de Manila Univesity Press, 2009; in Common Continent 189-197.
29 Kapend Baraka, a cultural staple in the Philippines, known for its strong, aromatic flavor, earthy and herbal, and sometimes containing hints of aniseed.
30 Appropriate to the protagonist's proclivity for immersion in nature, Batangas is a magnet for those who enjoy outdoor activities, especially beach lovers and mountain climbers.
31 Seeing a dark spot means that a person has a serious eye problem that, if left untreated, will result in permanent vision loss. It could be a retinal tear or detachment, a vitreous hemorrhage, wet age-related macular degeneration (the protagonist is 60, so this is a distinct possibility), a macular hole, central serous chorioretinopathy, or optic neuritis. In any case, it is necessary to see an opthalmologist immediately, especially since, if the condition is back of the eye, a retinal surgeon will also be required.
32 His name is ominously ironic. A caver is a spelunker, one who explores underground caves, which are pitch black, exactly what a blind person would perceive even in daylight.
33 This claim is doubtful, at best. “Dr.” Cavers listens to the protagonist's answers to his questions—any one of which would have set off alarm bells in an M.D. Of any specialization—but switches the questioning to her headaches and “treats” her by supplying a “tiny heap of powder on a square of paper.” (38) Although homeopathy has been practiced for over two centuries and no U.S. state bans it as fraudulent, it is widely considered quackery. Its underlying precept—“cures” based on the idea that a substance that causes symptoms in a healthy person can be used to treat similar symptoms in a sick person—is not supported by scintilla of scientific evidence. In California, where the story is set, a homeopath is not required to be an M.D. or an O.D. (the two unquestionably legitimate medical practice certifications) and is required by law to inform patients in writing that she/he is not licensed by the state as a healing arts practitioner.
34 These treats pale in comparison to the culinary creations of the Philippines that she juxtaposes with them. Coors beer enjoyed booming sales in the 1960's, but it was especially lionized by college students, some of whom even drove from Southern California to its base in Colorado to bring a few cases back with them. Although the beer remains a staple today, it is so thin, even watery, that no beer connoisseur would ever compare it to a light lager like Stella Artois. I have not been able to locate a rating or even a retailer or a distributor for John Fifield Chablis, but granted that Chablis originated in Burgundy, France, I suspect that it, like Coors, is intended to serve as juxtaposition reminder of what the protagonist has left behind in her homeland.
35 Talangka is crab roe, known as “Asian Shore Crab” in English. Buro is a traditional food preparation method, especially by fermentation. Usually, it involves fermenting cooked rice with fish or shrimp, which produces a tangy side dish.
36 Baguio is known for its lovely scenery and as a refuge from the heat and humidity of summertime in Manila. Baguio's allure has been both immortalized and idealized in the paintings of Fernando Cueto Amorsolo (1892-1972). Although he is associated with Impressionism, he is far closer to John Clare than to Georges Seurat. The human warmth of Baguio's people is caught in “Fruit Gatherer” (1950), a closeup of a pretty woman with her basket of fruit, not quite a still life but as engaging as a still life often is. The beauty of nature comes across in “Baguio” (1941), another oil on board, which depicts a human family on an awesome rocky outcrop in the midst of steep mountains, “Landscape,” a 1951 oil on canvas, has a foreground of planted and rock pile wall-separated fields, two circular huts in the middle distance, and a mountain background. Together, these paintings—romanticized though they are—show as no photographs ever could the aesthetic attraction of both the topography and the ambiance of Baguio.
37 A Tagalog word meaning “non-wiltable,” often applied to someone with great resilience and endurance.
38 On pages 43-47 in A River. Orig. pub. Nantucket Review 1979: 30-33. Rptd. In Common Continent 184-188.
39 On pages 49-57 in A River. Orig. pub. The Nantucket Review 1979: 40-48 and in Short Story International 56 (1986): 98-104.
40 On pages 119-130.
41 This sentence strongly evokes the closing two lines of John Frederick Nims' 1947 “Love Poem”: “For should your hands drop white and empty / All the toys of the world would break.”
42 Located in Massachusetts. From its summit, visibility extends to 90 miles on a clear day.
43 The enormous consequences of one irresponsible behavior does raise the same spectre that Coleridge's “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (1798) does. The enormous disproportion between cause and effect in the poem (shooting a harmless albatross brings on the loss of the ship and the lives of the rest of the crew, and the ancient mariner is condemned to walk the earth forever, telling his tale to anyone who will listen) broaches the possibility of a nightmare universe, illogical, irrational, and unpredictable. A lucid and compelling case for this possibility is made by Edward E. Bostetter in “The Nightmare World of 'The Ancient Mariner.” Studies in Romanticism 1.4 (Summer 1962): 241-254. Rptd. In Coleridge: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Kathleen Coburn. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1967: 65-77.
44 On pages 59-73 in A River.
45 The three-act play was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1938.
46 To the degree that only one reference to the Philippines is present: “Father had bought an angel of translucent capiz.. it might have been made [my emphasis] on the very island in the Philippines where he had landed with MacArthur.” (68) Tentative as this is, it also has an American bias (though an understandable one). The famous photograph of MacArthur wading ashore at Leyte on October 30, 1944 was doctored before it reached the newspapers. The original photo shows MacArthur flanked by Philippines President Sergio Osmeňa and Philippines Army Brigadier General Carlos Romulo. The picture that was published had expunged Osmeňa and Romulo and substituted two white American Officers. Since the narrator's father had participated in the Leyte landing, his memory of it, like the newspaper photo, gives the false impression that the U.S. had liberated the Philippines from the Japanese Occupation singlehandedly.
47 As we have seen, the title of the story on pages 43-47, which is the disquieting antithesis of the undisturbed mezzo piano of “After the Tinker.”
48 The Fred Rose song was composed in 1945. Perhaps the most expressive rendition of it is the 2025 version by Country Angel (the stage name of Ariel Alexis Franz), especially the lyric “Love is like a dying ember / only memories remain.” Jane Austen's classical novel, though written in 1795, was not published until 1811.
49 On pages 75-86. The collection concludes with an excerpt (on pages 87-102) from the novela A Small Party in the Garden (Quezon City: New Day, 1988) and the novella A River, One-Woman Deep (on pages 103-225).
50 The story in the Christian Bible is in Genesis Chapters 2-3.
51 In Italy the Black Shirts were paramilitary members of Benito Mussolini's Fascist party, “Black” both because of their uniform color and their violent tactics, as were Hitler's Black Shirts in Nazi Germany.
52 This theological position does not conflict with the Catholic theological stance that personhood is conferred at conception (a position especially well-articulated by Thomas Aquinas) because being a person is not enough by itself to warrant “the new birth” of baptism, which symbolically incorporates the individual into the “Body of Christ.” From this perspective, the stillborns properly could have been buried inside the walls of a secular cementary. But, pathetically, the narrator doesn't ever remember stopping at “...the baby graves outside the walls... their very location forbids it.” (81) Does it really? Was there a “Do Not Enter” notice at the entrance to the stillborns' graves?
53 In the Garden of Eden, God's provision for eternal life, lost when Adam and Eve eat the forbidden fruit (Genesis 2:9) is restored through Christ, who is sometimes called the Tree of Life. (Revelation 2:7 and 22.2)
54 This anecdote plausibly could have come, though it didn't, from Carlos Bulosan's The Laughter of My Father (New York: Harcourt, 1944). Like the appa vrent hijinks in Bulosan's short stories, the “I Forgot the Key” gambit here is a clever, if risky, trickster technique. For elaboration, see my article “The Laughter of My Father: A Survival Kit.” MELUS: The Journal of the Society of Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States 20.2 (Summer 1995): 35-46. Rptd. In my book And Quiet Flows the Dawn (Quezon City: Giraffe Books, 2003): 19-34.
55 Santa Monica, California: PALH, 2025. This memoir is a finely crafted capstone to her career, “a book well-written about a life well-lived,” as I ended my review of it in The Halo-Halo Review June 16, 2025: n.p.
*****
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.
No comments:
Post a Comment