FictionReviewThe intricacies of Filipino-American society are explored in a fresh, tender story about one woman’s journey from torture in the Philippines to a new life in CaliforniaAs titles go, this one is forceful: it proclaims that the book will correct some misconception about either nation or organ. The novel centres on a quiet woman with broken thumbs. Hero lives in Milpitas, a suburb of San Jose, California, where she works in a restaurant, babysits her cousin and flirts with Rosalyn, a cute makeup artist. Slowly, she reveals her past to Rosalyn and to the reader. Hero has travelled far: from a wealthy childhood in the Philippines, to the mountains where she was a doctor for guerrilla revolutionary group the National People’s Army, to the locked room in which she was tortured, and finally to America.
The US portions of the book focus on the intricacies of Filipino-American society. Castillo gives us hardworking nurses, snooty upper-class mothers, faith healers and restaurant workers as Hero navigates a web of relationships, some tracing back to grand mansions in the Philippines, others formed in the parking lots and hair salons of Milpitas. Castillo makes this small suburb feel vast, even overwhelming.
The sections set in the Philippines are fragmentary. We are given just enough detail to see how that time led to this one. Castillo etches in the class stratifications, civil strife and divide between rich and poor. Yet the emphasis of the narrative is in Milpitas. Hero’s hands were broken by her past, but the most important thing is what she does with them now. Her aunt grew up poor and hungry, yet now she is the one who sends money back. Castillo respects the right of these characters to have a present as important as their pasts.
The texture and complexity of this community are represented in part by the number of languages that flit across the page. Throughout, Castillo employs English, a smattering of Spanish and three of the native languages of the Philippines: Tagalog, Pangasinan and Ilocano. Although mixing languages to represent the code-switching of immigrant communities is now quite common in literature, it is rare to see so many in one book. Characters find themselves more or less able to navigate this multilingual maze, and this dipping between fluency and incomprehension is a particularly vivid way of expressing both the difficulty and beauty of belonging to an immigrant community.
Hero speaks Ilocano, English and Tagalog, but she lacks Pangasinan. A faith healer begins talking to her “in Pangasinan, a long sentence that sounded inviting, conspiratorial”. But the invitation and conspiracy are lost. Rosalyn, a Filipina-American, grew up with Tagalog, but now she “could barely read a sentence”. As she grew older, the language of her grandparents slipped away, almost without her noticing. Realising this is a source of deep and sudden pain.
Despite the barriers of communication caused by trauma, class and language, Hero begins to share tiny bits of herself. She starts to form relationships with her proud and spiky aunt, her bold cousin and with Rosalyn. On one level, the love story is mundane. The pair go to parties, watch a parade, share food. But it also feels radical, if only because such stories are so often ignored or glossed over. As a bisexual Asian American, I was startled by how moved I was. When I was growing up it was common to hear people say there weren’t such things as gay Asian girls, so to see them on the page is deeply gratifying. Castillo’s portrayal of their physical relationship is powerful because it is frank. The first time they have sex is clearly described. We see two women trying to figure out how their minds and bodies might fit together.
The book’s epigraph is a quote from Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart. Published in 1946, Bulosan’s semi-autobiographical novel follows a young Filipino and includes a speech that gives the work its title:
America is not a land of one race or one class of men. We are all Americans that have toiled and suffered and known oppression and defeat, from the first Indian that offered peace in Manhattan to the last Filipino pea pickers ... America is in the hearts of men that died for freedom; it is also in the eyes of men that are building a new world.
By quoting Bulosan and referencing his novel in her title, Castillo announces that her book is not only the story of Hero, but the story of a country. Hero occupies the new world predicted by Bulosan’s idealistic young man. Her world has indeed been built by Filipinos and Mexicans and black Americans. At one point, Rosalyn reflects that the men who ran a comics store were “the only white people [she] ever came across in Milpitas”.
Castillo’s America is not a utopia: there is poverty, unfairness and snobbery. Yet the tenderness of the characters glows. Like Bulosan’s, her America is in the heart. Hero and the reader come to love those she meets in the US. The Bay Area, at first a foreign land, feels like home by the end of the novel.
But the heart Castillo describes has room for more than America. It has room for Ilocano, Tagalog, Pangasinan. It stretches out beyond the US borders to comrades in the jungle and to family across oceans. Although the book is thick, it is a small vessel to contain all that Castillo slips in. She has brought a whole community to the page.
Rowan Hisayo Buchanan’s Harmless Like You is published by Sceptre.
America Is Not the Heart is published byAtlantic. To order a copy for £12.74 (RRP £14.99) go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
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