EILEEN TABIOS Engages
Tales From Manila Ave. by Patrick Joseph Caolie
(Sundress Publications, 2025)
Patrick Joseph Caolie writes the stories effectively in Tales From Manila Ave. through a straightforward writing style. He is particularly strong with dialogue as the featured conversations feel effortless and natural. Caolie’s style works to the benefit of the collection, in part because of the strong thread of sadness collating the stories together; linguistic embellishment might make the collection collapse to more of a sense of despair rather than bearable sadness.
Tales From Manila Ave. features, as its book description notes, “the joys and struggles of Filipino immigrants as they navigate life and ponder identity outside their motherland” of the Philippines. As a short story collection, the stories—I assume—were written individually over a period of time before becoming collected into a single book. I wonder if Caolie intended the sadness emanating from the collection to be the primary tenor of the collection (at least in terms of how I read it).
From my read, I don’t receive a sense of much “joy” even as there certainly are incidents of happiness in some of the stories. Instead, I received a type of haunting—many of the characters are unable to dampen self-awareness such that they seem to know that their life situations inevitably are related to some accommodation if not compromise because of being immigrants. Such ranges from feeling too cold in New England winters in “Sinigang” to having one’s memory of a parent tainted by a father’s infidelity shortly after he immigrated initially without his immediate family in “The Balikbayan Affair.”
In many cases, one becomes an immigrant for better opportunities outside of one’s birthland (as noted in “The House At the End of Maplewood Drive”). Is it that less-than-ideal rationale that dulls subsequent diasporic experience? I am reminded of a John Yau poem, “Ing Grish” that contains the words
“dropped into this world with scant ceremony, dropped as immigrants or sci-fi aliens, or angels painfully mired in matter, tainted, unable to return to the realm of light.”
The light in this collection, indeed, is often dim rather than attaining the sunlit realm.
But it is recommended reading, not because it’s heartwarming but because it’s not. What it presents is a nuanced reflection of the harsh reality of Filipino immigrant experience. Caolie, among other things, reveals himself to be an excellent observer. Such allows him to present an immigrant story that deserves the respect of being told truthfully—thus faced—full on and unembellished by how one prefers reality to have unfolded instead.
When the work is a collection, whether of stories or poems, the choice for the first and last work is significant. The first story, “Tales from Manila Ave.” is an excellent choice as it grounds all stories into the idea of a locale and experiences in a new country that nonetheless cannot avoid the country of origin. With its named street in the United States but named after a Philippine location, it deserves its status as the book’s title story.
Relatedly, the last story “Along Came A Stray” affirms the reality of the immigrant and this book: “lamenting… unrecoverable time.” I am grateful to this writer for his courage in facing immigration’s truth.
*****
Eileen R. Tabios has released books of poetry, fiction, essays, art and experimental prose from publishers around the world. Recent publications include a children’s book Tata Efren’s Forever Laughter (with Mel Vera Cruz and Jeannie E. Celestial); the novels The Balikbayan Artist and DoveLion; the poetry collections Engkanto in the Diaspora and Because I Love You, I Become War; an autobiography The Inventor; the short story collections The Erotic Space Around Art Objects and Getting To One; and an art monograph Drawing Six Directions. More information is at https://eileenrtabios.com
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