America Is in the Heart by Carlos Bulosan - University of Washington Press | Classic Filipino American Literature | Perfect for Book Clubs & Asian American Studies

America is in the Heart by Carlos Bulosan"They've all come to look for America..." -- Simon and Garfunkel's lyric from "America" was the constant soundtrack in my mind as I read this book. Few books are written by those in extreme poverty, much less by immigrants for whom English is a new language. While Steinbeck captured The Depression in The Grapes of Wrath, Bulosan actually experienced it firsthand, and barely survives to tell the tale. As an immigrant, he has the unique vantage of experiencing the intense poverty and racism in America as still preferable to the unending poverty of his family's tenant-farming community in Binolonan, Pangasinan, Philippines. “You shouldn’t have come to America. But you can’t go back now. You can never go back, Allos.”This work was published in 1946, on the eve of Philippines' independence. Much like reading various histories of America's (only) colonial project in the Philippines, Bulosan's depiction of stowing away in railroad boxcars looking for the next opportunity, the next meal, or escaping the last brutality, I find that this story is of an America forgotten, and hardly known, and deeply relevant in a year (2020) when both civil rights, police reform, and socialist movements are back in the forefront of activism. While many details may be fictionalized, or names and places altered or obscured, it is still autobiographical and quite vivid. Very few people from the depths publish a book their experiences, much less an immigrant in times when the U.S. Congress, and California, specifically passed laws limiting what Asian immigrants could do or own. Americans today are aware of the Japanese being interned in World War II, fewer are aware of laws that excluded Japanese from owning lands, from Asians holding office, or even marrying white U.S. citizens. This is part of what gives the book such great value."I came to know afterward that in many ways it was a crime to be a Filipino in California. I came to know that the public streets were not free to my people: we were stopped each time these vigilant patrolmen saw us driving a car. We were suspect each time we were seen with a white woman. And perhaps it was this narrowing of our life into an island, into a filthy segment of American society, that had driven Filipinos like Doro inward, hating everyone and despising all positive urgencies toward freedom."Bulosan's story is one of repeated survival, maintaining a love of life, and finding one's purpose. Carlos Bulosan was an Ilocano raised in Binalonan in Pangasinan. The tragedies his family experience there is a great window into village life in the Philippines even today. Wealthy, politically-connected landowners who live in Manila make decisions that ruin the lives of those sharecropping the estates. Bulosan watches as his father sells the only bits of land he owns in order to send one son to school. He details the tragedies of livelihoods lost after one bad flood wipes out the rice crop, or when illiterate farmers get cheated in contracts they don't understand."Some of my uncles were already dispossessed of their lands, so they went to the provincial government and fought for justice; but they came back to the village puzzled and defeated. It was then that one of my uncles resorted to violence and died violently, and another entered a world of crime and criminals. But my father believed in the eternal goodness of man...The peasants did not know to whom they should present their grievances or whom to fight when the cancer of exploitation became intolerable. They became cynical about the national government and the few powerful Filipinos of foreign extraction who were squeezing a fat livelihood out of it."Bulosan sells wares with his mother in neighboring villages, or breaks his leg climbing trees to cut coconuts, scrapping to put food on the table and continue his brother's education, in the hopes that he will make it out. He lists no dates in the book, so one has to guess at the years based on the events as he observes them as a child. He had a brother who fought in World War I, others who trained with the Philippines Scouts, and is vaguely aware of political movements in the gradual transition from U.S. colony to U.S. commonwealth toward full independence. In these hardships, Filipinos rely on their large families, and the love and sacrifice is evident. After immigrating to the USA, Bulosan repeatedly reconnects with his brothers in various (often criminal) circumstances, initially making personal sacrifices for them, and watching them do the same for him later. It's a beautiful picture of family and love, while also a tragic picture-- they can never go home again."I wanted to cry because my brother was no longer the person I had known in Binalonan. He was no longer the gentle, hard-working janitor in the presidencia. I remembered the time when he had gone to Lingayen to cook for my brother Macario! Now he had changed, and I could not understand him any more. “Please, God, don’t change me in America!” I said to myself, looking the other way so that I would not cry."The author's journey in America begins with the typical storybook optimism--surely life will be better here. Bulosan quickly experiences Alaskan commercial fishing, canning factories in Washington, and various fruit picking and restaurant kitchen jobs from California to Idaho, while also becoming a successful gambler. He witnesses seasoned migrants exploiting newcomers, different Asian nationalities competing with and exploiting one another, legislated discrimination, and abject police brutality that essentially cripples him for life."In San Diego, where I tried to get a job, I was beaten upon several occasions by restaurant and hotel proprietors. I put the blame on certain Filipinos who had behaved badly in America, who had instigated hate."“Listen to the brown monkey talk,” said one of the detectives, slapping Alonzo in the face. “He thinks he has the right to be educated. Listen to the bastard talk English. He thinks he is a white man. How do you make this white woman stick with you, googoo? The divorcée was driven out of town, warned never to see Filipinos again.""It was then a simple thing for the state legislature to pass a law forbidding marriage between members of the Malayan and Caucasian races. This action was followed by neighboring states until, when the war with Japan broke out in 1941, New Mexico was the nearest place to the Pacific Coast where Filipino soldiers could marry Caucasian women.""I knew that our decadence was imposed by a society alien to our character and inclination, alien to our heritage and history. It took me a long time, then, to erase the outward scars of these years, but the deep, invisible scars inside me are not wholly healed and forgotten."Despite it all, Bulosan develops friendships with Americans who are also critical of the injustices they see. His strong desire to live propels him forward with the hope that things can and will be better. He is always struck by the two Americas he is always facing-- kindness and opportunity with cruelty and discrimination. Amazingly, Bulosan maintains his faith in the idea of America:"And yet in this hospital, among white people—Americans like those who had denied us—we had found refuge and tolerance. Why was America so kind and yet so cruel? Was there no way to simplifying things in this continent so that suffering would be minimized? Was there no common denominator on which we could all meet? I was angry and confused, and wondered if I would ever understand this paradox.""(T)he American earth was like a huge heart unfolding warmly to receive me. I felt it spreading through my being, warming me with its glowing reality. It came to me that no man—no one at all—could destroy my faith in America again. It was something that had grown out of my defeats and successes, something shaped by my struggles for a place in this vast land, digging my hands into the rich soil here and there, catching a freight to the north and to the south, seeking free meals in dingy gambling houses, reading a book that opened up worlds of heroic thoughts. It was something that grew out of the sacrifices and loneliness of my friends, of my brothers in America and my family in the Philippines—something that grew out of our desire to know America, and to become a part of her great tradition, and to contribute something toward her final fulfillment. I knew that no man could destroy my faith in America that had sprung from all our hopes and aspirations, ever."I bought this book after Amazon kept recommending it to me, especially after I bought Gina Apostol's Insurrecto. I've worked in the Philippines and studied its history, particular its American period, pretty closely (see my other reviews) but I had never heard of this book, much less was I aware there was a Penguin Classic by a Filipino author. A poll of my university-educated Filipino friends found only one had read it--and she owns a bookshop that specializes in Filipino literature (she said "Bulosan is canon.") Apparently this book was "rediscovered" in the 1970s and made popular again. I recommend skipping the Introduction, a lengthy dissertation by a modern Bulosan scholar, until after completing the book. I highly recommend this book to Americans working in the Philippines for a perspective they will not otherwise have on rural poverty, the real problem of land ownership and corruption, the unique desperation of Filipinos trying to immigrate to the United States, and the breadth and trials of the Filipino immigrant diaspora.Unsurprisingly, recently unclassified files show that Bulosan's associations and writings drew the interest of the FBI as a Communist agitator. The book gives insight into the labor organization movements of migrant agricultural workers in the 1930s, and Bulosan indeed befriends many Leftist Communists, intensely interested in the fight in Europe against fascism and at least one of whom returned to Russia.It is difficult to keep in mind that Bulosan was illiterate for much of his life and was unable to record his thoughts in English until much later. Unable to attend school, he essentially becomes self-taught and it was befriending those in the literary diaspora while dealing with a long hospital stay for tuberculosis that he becomes a voracious reader. This also connected him to other Asian immigrant authors, and Bulosan lists several authors and works that I might check out later. Bulosan starts to have a desire to record the folk tales and other stories from the Philippines, as he realizes much of their literature is lost or unrecorded. His mind also sets to civil rights activism both for working class migrants, but always with a desire to return to help Filipinos in their own homeland."(I)f, at the end of my career, I could arrive at a positive understanding of America, then I could go back to the Philippines with a torch of enlightenment. And perhaps, if given a chance, I could help liberate the peasantry from ignorance and poverty...I think this is really the meaning of life: the extension of little things into the future so that they might be useful to other people.”Five stars.