America Is Not The Heart by Elaine Castillo

 

Source of book: Borrowed from the library

 

I put this book on my list after it was recommended by NPR. I just read the really short summary, which was enough to hook me, but having read the book, I realize that neither the summary nor the cover blurb really does justice to what this book is about. 

 

Also, the title itself is confusing, because this book is not an anti-American book. To us white Americans, the title might seem to have nothing to do with the book itself. I looked into it, however, and it is a sly reference to America Is In The Heart, by Carlos Bulosan, which is kind of the Filipino equivalent of The Scarlet Letter in the sense that it is a part of the curriculum everyone reads. 

 

 

 First, let me back up a bit, because one of the reasons that this book emotionally affected me like it did was because of my background. My parents were both born overseas as missionary kids; my dad was born and raised in the Philippines, so we grew up eating pancit and adobo and biko. Later, when I was in my teens, my grandfather became an associate pastor at a Filipino church in the Los Angeles area. I got involved with that because they needed a versatile musician to help out. Over a number of years, I played stuff from guitar to drums to violin as needed, both for the regular services and for the bigger musical productions. At the time, we lived in the mountains, and once yearly, they would all come up to our place after sledding, and put on a feast. I have so many fond memories of those times. After my grandfather died and I moved out and started a family of my own, I lost track of everyone, sadly. This was pre-Facebook, and geography and busy lives meant more difficulty staying in touch. If anyone runs across this post and wants to reconnect, drop me a line… 

 

This history was one reason that I was intrigued by the book. A Filipino immigration story? Sign me up. But the book is more than that. A lot more than that. It is the story of three generations of women torn in some way between the United States and the Philippines. It is a compelling love story between two women and the fallout from that. It is an unflinching look at the effects of trauma. It is an uncomfortable story of class boundaries and how they interact with social and legal power. It is a well-told and compelling story that is hard to put down. It is also a window into another culture - the Filipino-American culture in California during the 1990s. That’s the culture I experienced, and man, it took me back. It was an emotional ride in so many ways, but the memories it brought back were a trip. Oh, and in the Philippine scenes, I knew a lot of the names, because they were my dad’s old haunts, from Manila to Bagio. 

 

One of the reasons that the culture comes to life in this book is that Castillo made the conscious decision to write it with the characters talking the way they would talk. Which means that there are a lot of non-English words. Tagalog is the main secondary language, and, having been immersed in “Taglish” for a while, I kept up reasonably well. I mean, I am certainly not a Tagalog speaker or listener, but I know the honorifics (Tita, Tito, Ata, Nimang, etc.) fairly well, and the food better than I realized. (I mean, I could practically smell and see the dishes in my head - a restaurant is central to the story, so there is a LOT of food. Now I’m getting hungry again.) The rest, I won’t claim to know what the words mean, but in those cases where a speaker switched to Tagalog midstream, I was able to get the gist well enough without resorting to Google. 

 

Less successful was when Castillo’s characters used Ilocano, or especially Pangasinan. Those are outside my experience, so I had to look a few things up, or do the best I could with context. I am okay with Castillo’s choice, however, as she had good reasons. In fact, you can read her own words about why she wrote the book the way she did. She is spot on that she has no duty to write specifically for white, monolingual readers. There is no “one, single” American voice - and I am certainly not the only important reader. (Also, we white guys need to get over ourselves…) 

 

So, what IS this book about anyway? Well, it is a bit sprawling (in a good way - I was sad to get to the end) and covers a lot of ground in time, place, and character. Most of the book is from the perspective of Hero (short for Geronima), a 30 something Filipina who has just moved to Milpitas California to live with her uncle and his family. She has an interesting past, to say the least. Born in a rich family, she drops out of medical school to become a field medic with the New People’s Army. Ten years in, she was captured (probably mistaken for one of the leaders), tortured, and then released after the government realized that she was just a medic and was part of a family that was close to Marcos. Her family has mostly disowned her, except for one aunt who takes her in while her broken thumbs are surgically repaired (as much as possible - she remains somewhat crippled), and her uncle, who facilitate’s her trip to America and lets her live with them. 

 

Uncle Pol (Apolonio) is an interesting character. He was a well known surgeon, part of the rich and influential De Vera family (descended from the Spaniards, Chinese and Japanese Traders, and Ilocanos), but ended up in America for, well, that’s a story in itself. To understand that, you have to know the back story for his wife, Paz. Born into poverty, Paz grows up in a completely different social strata from Pol. However, her father, whatever his philandering faults are, manages to get hired on the American military compound on Guam, become an American citizen, and then bring his family over one at a time to California. Paz completes nursing school in the Philippines and works for a while, until her dad gets her a green card. After she immigrates, however, Pol, who has been pining for her for years, manages to contact her and convince her to marry him. (There is a whole backstory to Pol too - his first wife, his close relationship with Hero, who he believes is dead at the time, and his reputation for being a “babaero” - a playa, so to speak. Although the women love him because of his legendary cunniligus talents…) Anyway, to get the girl, Pol comes to America, but cannot work as a surgeon, having to be a lowly security guard while Paz brings home most of the bacon. It is a traumatic reversal of status for Pol. And a bonus for Paz, who has had to put up with nastiness from Pol’s family. 

 

Paz and Pol have a daughter, Roni (also short for Geronima - named after Hero who was believed dead) who is age seven then eight during the course of the story. She too has a hidden trauma - her older cousins molested her when she was there for babysitting. 

 

Hero comes to the US, but has no way of getting legal status - she remains undocumented. At first, she simply helps with childcare and household stuff, as well as driving Roni to and from school. (And no, she doesn’t have a license and cannot get one - this is a legitimate dilemma for undocumented immigrants.) Because Roni has eczema, Paz sends her to a traditional healer, Adela, who also owns a restaurant with her husband Boy. (Nicknames are a thing in Filipino culture for sure - the book is filled with them.) Adela’s grandaughter Roselyn works next door as a makeup specialist. When Roselyn meets Hero, she falls hard in love (although she is quite closeted, perhaps even to herself.) Hero, like the author, is bisexual, and is attracted to Roselyn, but doesn’t want to ruin a good friendship. Also, as we find out, Hero’s relationship to sex is complicated, and she has not done well in romantic or committed relationships in general. 

 

So, there’s that part of the plot. It’s a damn good love story, too, full of emotional complexity and realistic bumbling toward understandings. The book would qualify as true literary fiction for that reason alone - the nuance and perception of the relationship dynamics between the characters - all of them - are really superb. 

 

There are other subplots going on too. We gradually learn the story of Hero’s experiences, first in her “first life” growing up as a spoiled rich girl, then in NPA through her torture and imprisonment. The uncomfortable dynamic between Pol and Paz becomes open warfare when (near the end), Pol takes Roni back to the Philippines so she can be raised there by his family and he can return to his surgical practice. (I won’t spoil the ending beyond that…) There is the partial disintegration of Rosalyn’s family after Boy’s sudden death and the discovery of Rosalyn’s sexual orientation. 

 

Oh, and the book opens with thirty pages of back story written in the second person from Paz’s point of view. Personally, I found the second person thing annoying as hell, but that appears to be just me. Plenty of reviewers liked it, so your mileage may vary. Also in second person is a brief chapter giving Rosalyn’s point of view. As I said, it’s 400+ sprawling pages. 

 

There are two other writing tics that grated on me a bit, which probably means I am an old man. First is the fact that Castillo never uses quotation marks. Sure, not every language uses them, and you can figure out when someone is speaking. But I miss them. Second, in many of those dialogues, Castillo does the period. thing. Like that. With periods to indicate pauses, but with no capitalization. At this point, I shall shake my cane and mutter “Damn Millennials!”  

 

Throughout, Castillo examines the experience of immigrants in America from a somewhat different perspective. There isn’t much racism in the book, in part because the characters mostly exist in respect to each other, not the white world as such. Immigrant communities here in California do often have some insular characteristics, and tend to be more close knit and supportive than white culture. I find that admirable in a lot of ways. It isn’t unwelcoming either - I was embraced, although I was never and could never be a true insider. I was one of many non-Filipinos who were part of the group in that way, and it was a great experience. I think white Americans could learn a lot from that. 

 

They also could learn some history. Although I give my parents credit for teaching me more about racial issues than our curriculum, and for impressing on me that America wasn’t the only country or American Christianity the only “true” Christianity, I don’t think they really understood the effects of Colonialism in the countries of their birth. I could be wrong, but there were a lot of historical “facts” that I now realize were part of the “whitewashed” jingoistic American history myth. As I said, better than most in their generation by a good margin. But, that said, this book points out somewhere between 600,000 and 1,400,000 Filipinos were exterminated during the Philippine-American War after the US took over from Spain. Most died by disease and famine as a result of US policies to “subdue the natives.” Oh, and the forced conversions from Catholicism to Protestantism, the suppression of indiginous beliefs and traditions, and so on - if this sounds a bit like how we treated Native Americans...yes, it is part of the American tradition, sadly. There are some horrific quotes in the book from American commanders, from President McKinley - who openly called the war an “extermination” of the natives - to the various generals who were committed to “disarming the native population of the Philippines, even if we have to kill half of them.” Oh, and the answer to the trivia question, “When did the US first use waterboarding to torture people?” is “The Philippine-American War. We need to be honest about this history. We Americans LOVE to think of ourselves as the great white saviors of the world, but our legacy is a bloody trail of violence and genocide. If we hadn’t somehow ended up on the right side of World War Two (and maybe World War One), I find it hard to make a case for any of our military “adventures.” 

 

Speaking of history, the passages on the NPA are fascinating. I’m not defending the NPA in general, although the book certainly gives a different perspective from the white American one. But let’s be honest about one thing: Communist movements do not arise in a vacuum. They happen when there is genuine and horrific injustice and oppression. The description of the land grabs the wealthy (and lighter skinned…) Filipino oligarchs made at the expense of the poor is horrifying. (And a bit too close to how things have gone in the US over the last 40 years too.) Land that had belonged to communal groups for centuries were systematically plundered by the rich, using the power of debt and government. 

 

Also worth remembering is that Communist movements, for all their faults, have tended to be egalitarian in some crucial ways. It is not an accident that the Nazis used the Communists as the bogeyman, or that all Civil Rights movements in the US have been tarred as “Communist.” Ultimately, exploitation is exploitation. As one female NPA leader says in the book, “abuse of women is class exploitation,” which is why rape got you killed. Ultimately, racism and sexism are just manifestations of the class issue: who is worthy of equal rights and access to necessities and safety. To justify denying these to certain people (the poor, racial minorities, women…) the oppressors create myths about the “inferiority” of the oppressed. 

 

There are a few other things I want to mention about the book. I am not sure entirely how much of the book is autobiographical in some sense or another. Roni is clearly the character with the same basic experience as the author, being born and raised in the US as a second generation immigrant, speaking multiple languages, and so on. On the other hand, I wonder how much of Hero - or Rosalyn - is an emotional analogue for Castillo. Castillo did have a distant cousin who was in the NPA, and gave her the background on the experience. Clearly, as Castillo has said, her own identity as a Filipino-American bisexual woman informs her writing. (As identities do for all of us who write.) Of course, whether or not something in the book is autobiographical isn’t really important - the story is what it is whether it is literally “true” or not. It is fiction, and there is thus that complex interaction between the author and the reader. 

 

The book is at times shockingly frank about sex. Castillo is a vivid writer, and some of the pictures she paints are painful or disturbing at times. This is real life, not rosy romance, and sometimes fucking is, well, fucked up. In line with my general experience that women write far better sex scenes than men (on average, at least), the central sexual encounter in the book is the rare one that is awkward, somewhat explicit, and yet both romantic and sexy as hell. I rarely want sex scenes to happen in books, honestly, because they seem some combination of gratuitous and uncomfortable; and they rarely seem to illuminate the rest of the book. This one is different, as perspective on who both Rosalyn and Hero are shifts as a result. We see them in a different light as a result of sex, and the events and unfolding of their respective traumas afterward make much more sense as a result. Leaving out the sex would leave a huge hole in the book, which makes the scene the very opposite of gratuitous. 

 

Also crucial to the characterization is music. Hero and Rosalyn, having completely different upbringings, have musical tastes that might be on different planets. Rosalyn has friends who are DJs (and not in the radio sense) trying to make it in the “freestyle” world. Hero likes older white emo stuff that she discovered as a teen. (There’s more to that story too…) But here is the great line:

 

Hero hates freestyle, Rosalyn said. She made me listen to her music in the car when I picked her up. She only listens to music about white people having feelings.

 

This is kind of classic Rosalyn too. Her defense mechanism is often to act like this. After all, it was Rosalyn who wanted to hear the tapes. (For context, this is before Rosalyn has admitted she is in love with Hero, even to herself. Although Adela clearly knew from the start.)

 

The last 50 or so pages of the book are emotionally intense. I had to step away a few times, honestly. As I noted, Castillo is an effective writer, and does relationship dynamics so very well. There is this one scene where Paz and Hero finally connect. The two have been at arm’s length for most of the book, because Paz feels judged by Pol’s family, and that includes Hero, while Hero feels an uncomfortable sense of obligation to Paz, who has given her so much. After Pol takes Roni, though, the two of them find common ground in their trauma. They have this late night of talking and getting smashed on Pol’s gin. It’s great writing. The next morning, though, despite the fact that Paz is tiny compared to Hero, she is up in time for work as usual, while Hero - hardly unused to booze or unable to hold it - is left with an epic hangover. I have met a few like Paz, who manage to grind out 24 hour shifts and still function. 

 

I could write all day about the other intense scenes at the end, and the devastating lines the characters deliver. As I said, superb emotional and relational writing. I should mention the scene where Rosalyn tells Hero her mom is kicking her out of the house for being a lesbian. 

 

You can’t talk to her?

What a great idea, why didn’t I think of that, Rosalyn intoned dryly. 

Look, she’s been suspicious about me for years. She gonna take a while to. Be okay with it. If she’s ever going to be okay with it. I don’t know. We’ve never--Rosalyn flinched. Anyway. Grandma knows, obviously. I didn’t even have to tell her and she knew. She knew about you and me before we even--like, before anything even happened, did you know that?

 

The way Castillo captures the cadence of conversations is wonderful. This is just one example, of course. You can see it too in what isn’t on the page. The words between the lines. 

 

There is one more scene that is fascinating. Hero, having more life experience - and a wider range of experience too - notices that Rosalyn has never really gone outside of a very narrow set of places. That is why moving out to her own apartment is such a huge thing to Rosalyn. Hero mentions to Rosalyn that she hasn’t even been inside any of the competing restaurants.

 

No, Rosalyn said, then a look came over her face. Hero recognized that look, remembered what it had felt like to tell other students at UST about Vigan only to discover from the look of terror on their faces that her perspective on the world had been so much narrower than she’d imagined, a knife’s width. 

 

It is impossible to get into all the context in that paragraph - one reason the book is so good is the way it brings to life those other places and experiences and the dynamics that would cause a Manillan to assume Vigan is a terrorist hellhole while she thought of it in light of her privileged upbringing. 

 

I feel like I can’t begin to capture this book in a blog post, although I have tried. I rather enjoyed this book, which was unexpectedly emotional and moving, and a thoroughly engrossing read. 

 

***

 

I linked one of them above, but I think that a couple of articles are worth reading about this book. The first is the one Castillo herself wrote, which is the polar opposite of an apology. She is beyond unapologetic about how she wrote it. She is aggressively assertive, and I mean that in the best possible way. (I like strong women, in case it wasn’t obvious.) It’s just badass. Read it. 

 

There Is No Single Voice of America (on Lithub)

 

“But the thing is, these types of questions aren’t asked of all writers. These types of specific questions about untranslated languages are typically asked about use of non-Western words in a largely English language book (I don’t see people getting stressed about all the ancient Greek or French in George Eliot’s novels), and in my experience, they’re asked much more of writers of color, immigrant writers, first-generation writers. Tellingly, it’s in the work of these specific types of writers that untranslated, foreign-sounding words come to represent specific lacunae that we somehow continue to find difficult, if not outright hostile, to engage with in American fiction. And that’s unacceptable. It was always unacceptable, but it’s egregiously unacceptable in 2018.”

 

“The reason I write in English, and the reason I use untranslated words, are one and the same, the punchline to that rambling, viciously grim joke also known as history: because I’m fucking American.”

 

Or how about this bit, which hit home as EXACTLY my experience as a guest in the Filipino-American world. 

 

“Let’s say I invite you to my house. And I dress up in my best and least offensive outfit, and I have everybody dress up in their own best and least offensive outfits. And there’s food laid out on the table, and all the dishes have been prepared to your taste. And we’re all talking to you, politely and clearly, so that you can understand every word we say, and all of our conversations are directed towards you, for your comfort and pleasure. When you’ve left the house—have you met us? Have you met any people, at all?

“On the other hand: I invite you to my home. I wear what I normally wear when I’m trying to look a little cute, and so does everybody else. There’s food laid out on the table, some of which you might eat, some of which you might not like the look of that much, and you’re free to take and leave what you will. The conversation flows among all of us; sometimes we talk to you, but sometimes you’ll overhear us talking to each other, and you might not understand what we’re saying. You’re also not the only guest—maybe a guest next to you does understand what we’re saying and can chime in, and maybe you get a little jealous, maybe you think she’s having a better time because of that.

“But then again: you’re not there to compete about who’s having the best time. You’re busy, maybe, connecting with someone at the table that you’re having a really good conversation with, maybe you guys like the same music or have the same sense of humor, maybe it’s just the slow-burning mystery of human chemistry, who knows, maybe you’re even flirting a little, fuck it. Connecting’s all right, food’s pretty good, and when you leave, you may not have understood every single word that was said, but I guarantee you: you will have met people.

“And in the end, it’s because of people that untranslated words are important in fiction. Because as long as we continue to uphold the belief that non-English words are somehow alien to American fiction, we will never have an American readership that is commensurate to its American reality, or the people it produced. People like me. Hi.”

 

Hell. Yeah. Preach it. And yes, I increasingly have zero patience for the racist asshats that want to Make America White Great Again. You jackasses aren’t the real America, and haven’t ever been. Get over it. 

 

The second article is the interview in The Guardian. It’s worth a read.