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August 24 - August 30, 2000
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Reading American Son is not a relaxing experience. Almost short enough to be a novella, Brian Ascalon Roley’s first novel about the lives of two half-Filipino brothers in Southern California reads like an emotional live wire. Roley’s terse, raw prose gets right to the point, leaving no questions unanswered about the pain that can be inflicted between family and the crushing confusion of immigrant identity. Definitely not a feel-good book — rather, it is one of the most stunningly affecting and original works in the past few years.
Gabe, the novel’s narrator, is the good son. Painfully shy to the point of near-paralysis around strangers, he is the opposite of his darker, Mexican-gangster wannabe brother Tomas. While Gabe helps with chores around the house, Tomas “is the son who causes... embarrassment by showing up at family parties with his muscles covered in gangster tattoos and his head shaved down to stubble and his eyes bloodshot from pot.”
Their devoted, accented mother, Ika, rounds out the family, a lonely figure whom the boys are at once fiercely protective of and embarrassed by. The long-gone, abusive American father exists only in the need both brothers unconsciously express for male guidance. Ika “is short and dark and wears funny-looking giant purple glasses that are trendy on other people’s mothers but which do not match her brown skin tone.” Defeated and tired, she threatens to return to the Philippines. She receives letters from her brother, Betino, at the start of each section. Betino regales the lush life she could have had if she had stayed in the Philipines and constantly criticizes the lax discipline of America that has served to spoil her children. But in Gabe’s memories of a visit to her homeland, she constantly complained about the heat and bugs and inconveniences, saying “I’ve lived in the States longer than the Philippines. I’m an American now.”
Roley’s Southern California landscape is stripped of any essence of glamour and glitz. He writes with a dry, biting honesty: “At night here, it is empty except for the black kids who hang out at the liquor store and the Lee Fan kick-boxing students who are not afraid of the black and Mexican gangs who come here to shoot each other and sometimes die.” He oscillates fluidly between the hot asphalt/dried-out palm tree street scenes and the “yoga mom”-populated, shadowy suburbs and private schools.
Tomas trains attack dogs and sells them to rich Hollywood types, who pay up to $12,000 for one dog. Layered with endless power struggles, the story explodes with tension when Tomas and Gabe go to a rich producer’s house to sell one of Tomas’s dogs. In this world of white privilege and Mexican maids, Tomas’s carefully constructed identity seems to fall apart and he takes it out on Gabe, who suffers both physically and emotionally from his older brother. Roley’s deft descriptions leave you with the taste of blood in your mouth and the blur of unexpected tears in your eyes. In reaction, Gabe escapes the bubbling confusion of Los Angeles by stealing his brother’s car and taking off for the white-washed outer-lands of Northern California, where he discovers that he, too, can pass for what he is not.
Gabe’s super-sensitivity and self-awareness are depicted so credibly that his interactions with people are nearly nausea-inducing, “The curly one is the prettiest and scares me the most.” He does whatever he can to remain inconspicuous, while hating the margins that he is forced to exist in. Driving along the barren California highways with Gabe and the unlikely tow-truck-driving father figure he encounters, we see the utter pitfalls of assimilation and the inevitable pain of self-hatred.
Caught between the different identities that being an American means, Gabe’s life gets more and more caught up with Tomas’s, spiraling downwards at a breathless pace.
American Son is a frightening and unapologetic look at both the immigrant and bi-racial experience, introducing us to a cast of original characters who have been brought to life with prose so sharp it hurts.
Brian Ascalon Roley: Words from an American Son
By Neela Banerjee
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Over weak coffee in a musak-blaring, cafeteria-style restaurant in San Francisco’s Laurel Heights neighborhood, Roley quickly forgets about the tape recorder and opens up. Soft-spoken and articulate, Roley grew up in Santa Monica — the only son of a Filipino woman and a “Caucasian guy from the Midwest.”
Characterizing himself as a bookworm, Roley spent his younger years reading the adventure/mystery books of the Hardy Boys and Agatha Christie. He also found himself drawn to the colonial adventure epics of James Michener.
“I liked being transported,” Roley says.
While the characters in American Son, suffer from serious questions surrounding their identity — not identifying as Filipino at all — Roley says that as a child, it wasn’t an issue for him.
“The Filipino community for me growing up was my family,” he says. “My grandmother and uncle lived with us. My aunt lived close by with my cousins; we always had relatives staying over from the Philippines. It didn’t even occur to me that it was an issue until I got to junior high and was more self-conscious. I started thinking, ‘Oh wait, everyone else is white.”
Roley says in high school he didn’t really identify with other APIAs and wanted to be more accepted by the mainstream. At this time, he was writing mostly plays.
For college, Roley moved east and attended progressive liberal-arts school, Wesleyan University. Here he, like many APIAs, became more settled with his identity and found a larger community.
Oddly, Roley lost touch with his writing in college. At the time, he says, Wesleyan did not offer a writing program and he was rejected from one of the only courses they did offer. Roley graduated with a major in philosophy. A few years later, looking for some stability and with pressure from his family to find a practical path, he enrolled in law school at UCLA. This is when he really started writing.
About law school, Roley says: “It was just so logical. The reading was awful, all that legalese. The people are so different its almost unbelievable. Law school people are bookish in a very different way. Not all law school people are contentious people, but law school teaches you to be that way. You find yourself standing around in hallways arguing over things you don’t even care about. It’s kind of irritating if you don’t like arguing.”
Asked if he was unhappy, he pauses and then admits the truth, “I couldn’t stand law school.”
But Roley says law school made writing a joy. He would force himself to write for four or five hours every morning, often neglecting his studies. Living in Los Angeles again, Roley was inspired to write by what he saw around him.
“I had a couple of cousins I was pretty close to who started dressing like Mexican gangsters, and one of them was even in a gang. I thought it was odd,” Roley says. “This was before white kids in the suburbs were into hip-hop like they are now. It wasn’t a fashion statement, they were actually passing, pretending that they were Chicano. The normal thing is that minorities want to pass as white and I thought, well, this is very similar, except they grew up in a different neighborhood, went to a different school.”
After working on a number of short stories on this theme and earning his JD, Roley enrolled in Cornell University’s prestigious MFA program where he really got underway on his novel. After finishing this degree, Roley stayed on at Cornell and taught for a few years and shopped his book around to agents. It wasn’t a completely easy road. Roley says that the first agency who picked up his book kept it for six months before ultimately rejecting it. But after that, his next agent sold the book to Norton right away.
Now, Roley lives in San Francisco with his wife Gwen, a CPA who he met on vacation in New Zealand. He is at work on his next novels and writes all day long.
American Son has received both critical and popular praise. Roley says that he was worried that some of the controversial and violent matters that he wrote about would cause more of a stir.
“You know, its funny, I haven’t gotten any hate mail, which I’m really surprised about,” Roley says. “I thought this book would really piss some people off. ”
He says that he didn’t really write the book with a particular audience in mind, only that he wanted to “write something that a reader like me could enjoy. I wanted something that a [white person] could enjoy too, but I didn’t want to dumb it down, didn’t want to do a lot of explaining of the history of the Philippines for people who didn’t know it was an American colony. Because I wanted the book to be so intensely emotional, I wanted it to be condensed.”
Living in San Francisco, with its vibrant APIA community, has been a real boon to Roley. He has found a renewed sense of community especially with the strong Hapa presence that has become vocal in the past few years.
“I did a reading recently for a group of Hapas and its weird because all the half-Asian, half-White people I knew were me, my sister and my cousins and its strange to read to a room full of such people — but really good, too.”
Death of a Red Heroine
By Qiu Xiaolong
(Soho Press, Inc)
Chen Cao, head of the Shanghai Police Bureau’s Special Case Squad, is not your typical cop. A published poet and translator of T.S. Eliot, Chen embodies the renaissance-style of Sherlock Holmes, his logical thinking is paired with occasional quotes from Chinese poetry. Yet with risky romantic choices, high-society ex-girlfriends and a predilection for danger, he retains the cool of noir’s Sam Spade. When young, beautiful Guan Hongying — a former National Model worker — is found murdered, Chen takes on the enigmatic case. When the secrets he uncovers take a decidedly politically un-correct turn, Chen must navigate the rough currents of modern Chinese society. The Chinese political climate of the 1990s presents itself as its own shadowy character, but never too obtrusively. Imbued with rich details of Shanghai, Chen’s struggle with artistic expression and individuality in the face of Communism make this much more than just your typical mystery. Yet, Xiaolong follows the framework of the usual whodunit and knows exactly how to make this nearly 500 page novel a page-turner. The first in a forthcoming series of novels featuring Inspector Chen, we can look forward to a new flavor of hero holding down the world of murder and mayhem.
— N. Banerjee
Bombay Time
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By Thrity Umrigar
(Picador USA)
At this point in time, one would think that each and every apartment building in Bombay is populated with an intertwined cast of characters with enough melodrama in their secret lives to fuel thousands of novels. The perfect formula includes a sloppy drunk, a shrill gossip and a frustrated middle-class man distracted by unfulfilled dreams. Just like Manil Suri’s Death of Vishnu and the exact same idea as Rohinton Mistry’s Swimming Lessons, Thrity Umrigar’s first novel takes us inside the lives of the Parsi inhabitants of Wadia Baug – a middle-class apartment building in Bombay. Wound around the present-day marriage of one of the building’s sons, the narrative is much more about the rich and detailed pasts of the building’s inhabitants. For instance the earth-shattering affair with the daughter of a laborer that doomed the life of the resident drunk or the glowing picture of who Dosamai was before she became the much-reviled gossip. Umrigar, a reporter for the Akron-Beacon Journal in Ohio, is an excellent story-teller, and adds enough humor and gritty detail into the lives of these people to give the book a real sense of humanity. Yet, reading this book gives me an unnerving sense of claustrophobia – as though I am trapped within Wadia Baug’s crumbling walls myself – the lack of originality sealing off the doors and windows.
— N. Banerjee
Chitra Divakaruni on her favorite book: My all time favorite book is Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior. I read it at a very impressionable time in my life, when I’d just started going to U.C. Berkeley, and the book changed the way I viewed both myself and my community. It made me see much more deeply into the nuances of being an Indian American woman, and it made me question many things about my life and my ideas. It is such a powerful book—from the very first sentence of the first section, “No Name Woman,” I was caught. It inspired me. I, too, wanted to tell the stories of nameless women whom I had known and imagined. I hadn’t grown up thinking that I would write. I think it was this book that made me into a writer.
— Chitra Divakaruni’s newest novel, The Vine of Desire, will be cut in January.
Magical, Postcolonial Storytelling
The Kissing
By Merlinda Bobis
(Aunt Lute Books)
By Kavita Kumar
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Cultures meet, mix, and sometimes collide on the tongue — in a taste, a word, a kiss — in Merlinda Bobis’ book of short stories The Kissing.
In her opening story, “An Ernest Parable,” an Australian neighborhood of immigrants — a Filipino, a Sri Lankan, an Italian, a Turk, and an Australian couple — take turns sharing a tongue. Bobis writes that the tongue had an excellent memory: “Even when it had moved to a new mouth, it still evoked the breath of spices, sweets and syllables of the former host. It was never known to forget anything . . . .”
Thus sets the tone of Bobis’ postcolonial book set in Australia and the Philippines. In her 23 stories, interactions between Australians and Filipinos, rich urbanites and poor villagers, and men and women are rarely benign. Wives become domestics abroad or in the cities and never return to their families. When a Filipina villager falls in love with an Australian anthropologist, her daughter is cursed with baldness.
Which isn’t to say Bobis’ book is all gloom and doom. Many of her stories teem with magic and take on mythological proportions in the oral talk-story tradition of the Pacific. A giant white turtle materializes as an old Filipina woman who chants a poem; a woman extracts corpses with her hair from the river which smells like lemon grass.
Bobis, a Filipina Australian, has written four books of poetry and four plays. Her poetic background shines through in her short stories with piercing metaphors. Many of the images stay with the reader long after he/she puts down the book: villagers who pray on the ground when an airplane flies overhead because they think it is a flying cross; a 5-year-old girl whose shoes are too tight on a hot day; a musical half-note about to drop from its stem.
She mixes phrases and poems from her homeland, as well as the Bikol dialect, with English. Thankfully, there is no glossary at the end. Rather, she weaves translations into the text where needed and sometimes does not translate at all. In “The Long Siesta as a Language Primer,” a story unfolds from a poem’s footnote translating a Filipino phrase. The footnote is followed by a series of footnotes and translations through which the story of a young prostitute is told. The piece “Triptych”, which is written in three columns side by side, can be read vertically or horizontally.
An interesting tension throughout the collection is the role of the Filipino Australian — or the native who has gone civilized. It is especially interesting because this is the social position of the author herself. In one of Bobis’ best stories, “White Turtle”, an anthropologist brings Lola Basyon, a Filipina storyteller, to Sydney to perform her oral chants. The audience is mesmerized by her exoticness. And the Filipino newspaperwoman who lives in Australia is just as exploitative of Basyon as the rest, promising to make her famous.
In another story, “Border Lover,” a Filipina woman returns to the Philippines from Australia to visit her grandmother. She’s a perfectly postmodern subject: “My dialect Bikol... then Filipino, then English, all mixed up, broken into an almost infantile blabber.” But her grandmother accuses her of coming back with all her education and Western ideas of feminism, and looking down on her. Indeed, she no longer really understands the world she came from.
This tension never seems to be resolved in the book. The question remains: Are all interactions between the native and the colonizer doomed? Perhaps an answer can be found in the beginning parable of the one tongue shared among five households. In the parable, tastes and words from different cultures peacefully mix, right?
But then again, remember that the tongue never forgets anything, “least of all the fact that it was once the soft, pink flesh of a South Coast mollusk. The six households understood this origin in their mouths. The tongue was a gift of the landscape.”
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