America Is Still in the Heart
July 29, 2005
Our world was this one, but a new one was being born.” America Is in the Heart, 1946. Carlos Bulosan wrote those words about World War II, but they are prophetic for the War on Terror today. His voice rings true nearly 60 years later because he captured the essence of America. President Franklin Roosevelt even tapped Bulosan as one of four writers to publish in the Saturday Evening Post articulating the “Four Freedoms” that America stood for during the second world war.
Bulosan’s was the ideal immigrant story: Arriving in Seattle at the age of 17 and overcoming poverty, adversity and the overt racism of the time to gain national recognition and become one of America’s premier authors.
But his world did change after World War II, as a combination of McCarthyism and racism trampled over his rights and took away his opportunities. He was ostracized from writing jobs and threatened with deportation. His health deteriorated.
Yet Bulosan had an optimism that always triumphed for him. He never stopped writing. In his own estimation, he had a million unpublished words. He planned a sequel to his classic America Is in the Heart, and was awarded a Carnegie Foundation Fellowship.
This indomitable spirit within Bulosan is what made his writing classic. He always saw in America, the contradiction of the good and the bad. He often spent time “to wonder about the paradox of America” –– that American society would not let him marry his white girlfriend, yet there were many other white Americans who also showed him exceptional care and kindness.
In this, Bulosan also saw the future of America as a nation of all races, and the exemplary role of Asians to create a nation that crosses racial and color lines. Long before the U.S. Census forecasted the American population as having no majority race, he wrote that we were “not a land of one race or one class … [but] a new world … from the first Indian that offered peace in Manhattan to the last Filipino pea pickers.”
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