America Is In The Heart: Again

God Bless: a most heavenly shout out from above to Trisha Ramos. Happy Birthday!
Feelin: :-/

phew! that's a hefty reading load for the weekend, eh?
anyhoot, just got back from theatre rice rehearsals. i hope you guys can come check out the show!

THEATRE RICE!
(a modern Asian-American sketch-comedy (a la Saturday Night Live) / improv (a la Whose Line Is It Anyway?) team
Friday March 4, 7 pm
Satuday March 5, 5:30 pm
155 Dwinelle
$2-5 pay-what-you-can
profits go to charity
tickets available at table on Sproul

anyways, on with the show!
…

Yeah, I’m running out of things to comment on. Well, I guess a good place to start is the video we watched in class, Dollar a Day, Dime a Dance. The interviews and testimonials helped put a face on the anecdotes Bulosan provides in America Is In The Heart. It’s funny to think that those old men in the video, with their weathered faces and the secret memories they hide in their smiles, were the same young men that labored in the fields, that left all sentiments of home across the Pacific, that got-down in the dancehalls and got up every day to repeat the same routine. I hope I have stories like them to tell when I am an old lolo.

Random:
Carlos Bulosan would rank varsity; that is, if farming were deemed an athletic event. Indeed so, for Bulosan was a farmer in the truest sense. He planted the seeds of a labor movement. He planted a prayer for something more than gaudy prostitutes and ghettoes and gambling dens. He planted hope for a bona fide land of the free, an architecture of an ideal America he had learned of in school but had constructed in his heart. He planted all these, willing them to bear fruit, confronting the question of the Filipino’s place in the United States of America. It was a question that haunted all Filipino immigrants, and it is a stubborn question that lingers still--a bitter after-taste in the minds of their Filipino-American descendants.

Bulosan launches into a veritable sermon on the true meaning of America without waiting for the backup choir to kick in with “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” For pages 189 to 189, Bulosan might as well be talking from atop a soapbox. I think these two pages constitute the meat of this novel/autobiography. Beyond the prostitutes and pool halls and gambling dens lies Bulosan’s message—that, despite the horrors and violence he endures, the architecture of an ideal America is safe and sound in his heart. Bulosan’s America is all-inclusive:
“We are all that nameless foreigner, that homeless refugee, that hungry boy, that illiterate immigrant and that lynched black body. All of us, from the first Adams to the last Filipino, native born or alien, educated or illiterate—We are America!”.

But is he foolishly faithful to an America that doesn’t reciprocate his love?
It all reminds me of something my grandma says: “I may live like a Filipino, but I am American because I am free.”

More Random:
I can’t recall the page it occurs on, but there’s gotta be some irony in the moment when an aspiring writer proclaims to Bulosan, “I will be the first acclaimed Filipino American writer!” (or something like that). Those are words to die by. It’s like horror movie characters saying “I’ll be right back!” Or Jasmine Trias—God bless her—saying “I’m here because I’m the next American Idol!” Or any of us saying “I think I did alright” while walking out of a midterm. It’s called a jinx.

And regarding the role of women in the novel:
I’m not sure. :-/ In the video we watched in class, the manongs often mentioned that women were a catalyst for community and brotherhood—they brought everyone together. In this novel, though, women (the strikebreaker witch comes to mind) prevent coalitions from forming.
There is also the occasional girl that reminds Bulosan of qualities he associates with his mother and sisters. I don’t know how this plays into everything—I’m pretty dense. L

Okay, time to go cry over all the work that needs to be done.

America Is In The Heart V 2.0

God Bless: Much love from the Big Guy to Lara Estrada for not being too harsh in her peer edit.
Feeling: :-/

I gave up procrastination for Lent. I just haven’t gotten around to it. :-/
Hence, the late posting. Just a quick question: is anyone else getting stressed yet? The semester’s getting heavy, eh? Okay, enough.

So, Bulosan’s finally made it to America. I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m definitely starting to sense a pattern in his travels. Mary Kate and Ashley do something similar in their straight-to-DVD movies:
1.) Mary Kate and Ashley travel to a foreign country
2.) Mary Kate and Ashley go shopping
3.) Mary Kate and Ashley fall in puppy love with two foreign boys
4.) Mary Kate and Ashley must prove that they have different personalities
5.) Mary Kate and Ashley travel to a new country and begin back at step 1
How many movies have those 2 made? That’s a lot of foreign boys! That promiscuous pair, them. Bulosan’s travels cycle as such:
1.) Bulosan arrives in a new city
2.) Bulosan tries to find work
3.) Violence/promiscuity ensues.
4.) *Optional* Bulosan encounters a brother
5.) Bulosan flees to a new city
Or something like that. I find it interesting that the brothers he encounters in America are not the same brothers he remembers in the Philippines. America has done something to them—has extracted from them a quality, an integrity, an innocence that has crumpled in the shadows of prostitutes and dance halls and gambling dens. I commiserate with Bulosan. I have witnessed his naiveté. He is a soldier, a champion of his own innocence. And I think his determination to not allow America to crush his spirit is the same determination that makes him an effective advocate for laborers’ rights. I see the same fight in my elders’ eyes whenever they see murders on CSI: Las Vegas or brats with their Abercrombie and iPods, whenever they’re spoken to slowly at Williams and Sonoma or Nordstrom or anywhere in Palo Alto, California. I see the fire in their eyes dwindle when they are confronted with an America they do not understand. And my heart breaks.

On another note, although I am a very dense person and a poor analyzer (and an even worse English student), I didn’t pick up on any homosexual undertones in America Is In The Heart. I guess I’m very sheltered? Or unassuming? Or my gaydar is non-existent—I can’t tell the difference between Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and Teletubbies, although I hear there are homosexuals in both. I thought the friend he made on the ship (the one that tended to him while he was sick) was just very caring, and that the man that fed him and danced was equally hospitable and kind-hearted. I don’t know that there was necessarily a homosexual subtext to these incidents. Instead, I thought that these encounters represented the potential for the members of a Diaspora to establish fraternity. I thought it was a testament to the human spirit—that Filipinos that were separated by geography and culture in the Philippines could recognize they were brothers given their status as minorities.

Also, no matter how obscene or shocking the experiences Bulosan has in the Philippines (for example, the mob at his brother’s wedding), the atrocities he witnesses in America, to me, are even more awful and violent.

Alrighty, now to write that paper!

2 For 1! America Is In The Heart AND The Life and Times of Carlos Crisostomo

It’s probably just me (i’m usually off the mark), but i thought that in America Is In The Heart, our friend Carlos Bulosan consistently revisits (bwaha, pun intended) the notion of homecoming.
The fact that Bulosan’s family must constantly relocate takes a sledgehammer to the sentimental notion that home is a specific location—a house, a property, contained neatly within fences and defined by boundaries. In the childhood memories he shares with us, Bulosan never describes a moment when his entire family is united. Social and financial forces push the family to divide so that they might survive, if not together, then at least apart. Again, I’m always off-mark, but I think that the circumstances under which Bulosan’s family survived are a testament to the integrity and the strength of the ties that bind a family together—although the family is never together under one roof, they are united in their labor and their efforts to ensure their survival. For example, Carlos works with his father and Amado in the province, while his mother and his sisters remain in the village to sell vegetables, and the entire family labors to finance Macario’s education. Then again, I might just be misconstruing their circumstances by analyzing them from a Western understanding of family. BUT I am Filipino (gosh darnit) and I can see how, in my own family, my aunties and uncles have scattered themselves about the globe and pool their resources for the sake of the clan.

Aaaaanyhoot, back to the book. As a consequence of the family’s constant migration, Bulosan’s Philippine memories are scattered throughout the province, or throughout the Northern island of Luzon, for what it’s worth.

Also in regards to homecoming, I liked when each of his brothers came home. Wow, that sounded really Reading Rainbow (somewhere, Levar Burton shakes his fist). Anyways, when Leon, Luciano, and Macario come home (or reunite with the family), it’s never for very long. I’m not sure, but I’m guessing that this intimates that home for them is not the same once they have left and are returning to it. This concept might foreshadow the feelings about “home” that Carlos will develop once he is in America. Such feelings are detailed in the short story “The Life and Times of Carlos Crisostomo.” Relevant quotes:

“The tragedy of our life in America…is that we are flotsam—purposeless wanderers, misguided, hedonistic birds of passage. And we are these because when we came to this country we came as migrants; we did not come as immigrants, for we had no intention to live here permanently, to settle down, to establish roots” (81) .

“The second myth is that when we go home we will going home for good...There must be thousands of Old-Timers roaming around the country…’Home’ is no longer in their vocabulary” (82).

The Filipino “really cannot go back home for good anymore for a number of reasons, among which are his failure to obtain what he came to America for” (83).

And just a little tidbit:
Is that foreshadowing I smell? Macario reads to Carlos from the book Robinson Crusoe, a story about “the struggle of this ingenious man who had lived alone for years in inclement weathers and had survived loneliness and returned safely to his native land” (32). True, I don’t think Bulosan ever returned to the Philippines, but when Macario says “Someday you may be left alone somewhere in the world and you will have to depend on your own ingenuity,” it’s like he’s playing Miss Cleo and cursing his brother’s fate.

And a nice little quote about leaving home and the dream of coming home:
“I knew that I was going away from everything I had loved and known. I knew that if I ever returned the first sight of that horizon would be the most beautiful sight in the world” (93).

Lola

Well, i just put down America Is In the Heart. i'm really liking the setting of the opening of the book. The lifestyle they live just made me think about the circumstances under which my parents grew up--and consequently how much their lives have changed.

...

Oh ho ho, i fooled you! i bet you thought i was gonna play my brown pride card and turn this into an emoblog where i ranted about my roots.

...

Well, okay, maybe just a little. :-X But for serioso, reading how agriculturally dependent Bulosan's family was, how precarious their financial circumstances were, how the residue of happiness lingered in spite of the simplicity and modesty and hardship of their lives--it all just makes me think of my Lola. My grandmother. Like Amado, my lola had to leave school very early to help her family work the land. She's a trooper, that old lady. She's a varsity-level survivor. And now, back home in San Jose, she's content to grow roses and kalabasa. But what amazes me is that, given any conditions--dry land, little rain, no tools--she always manages to make sure her plants grow. And they thrive.

Yeah, i meant that symbolically too. bam!

And no worries, Ms. Gier, you can breathe! I'll write a more English-class-appropriate entry later. :-)

{m}aganda open mic!

Hey guys! Hope to see you there, eh? (that's how they say it in Canada)

[m]aganda's

"I LOVE YOU...NOT"open mic

this thursday!

830pm 30 wheeler

Poems by Jose Garcia Villa

Lorca’s poems
i don’t know what to make of it all. And I’m pretty sure ol’ Jose didn’t write these poems just to confuse the hair off of future generations of English students and get a kick out of it (even though that’s what he accomplished, God bless him). Nevertheless, this is my best shot at interpreting these poems:

“Lyric 17”
I like his command of poetic devices and topography. The latter reminds me of Scripture. The word “love” in the first line is conspicuously capitalized—perhaps to signify its significance? The only other capitalized word is “God.” e. e. cummings also utilized this particular topographical innovation. In his poems he often made all first-person pronoun “I”s lower-cased—implying humility and self-subjugation and awe before the divine. When Villa capitalizes “love,” he might be expressing reverence. Further evidence of Villa’s respect for Love lies in the fact that he personifies Love. He engenders Love. He denotes her female (3). He gives her lips and a voice (1-3).

“I can no more hear Love’s / Voice. No more moves / The mouth of her…”

He places her at the center of the universe and orbits her, for without love all ceases to function as they are supposed to: “…Birds / No more sing. Words / I speak return lonely… / Fire that I burn glows / Pale” (3-5, 7). It’s a good thing the poem doesn’t end in hyperbole, otherwise it might come off melodramatic (insert sarcasm). Just kidding. That line, “O my God! I am dead,” that just hits it (14). As if there is nothing worth living for more than Love. As if loneliness were a state of death, or to be alone is to be dead.

If Villa had a Xanga, i’d sure give him 2 eprops. J

“Lyric 57” and “Lyric 22”
He scatters “O” throughout “Lyric 57” and “Lyric 22,” and so they read like dirges. They read like laments. i’m not well-read enough to excavate any traces of Poe-influence in these poems, but they are undoubtedly morbid.

“Fragment”
i think Villa meant to title this poem “FragmentED.” He erects commas like stumbling blocks between words. The punctuations (are you ready for this?) fragment the poem. What was the point of this essay? This might be stretching it, but, in employing all those commas (those punctuation-hurdles), was Villa attempting to vocalize a frustration with the Philippines’ linguistic transition to English? To a new and complicated language that made the people trip over syntax and falter through diction and stumble over their sentences?

"Caps and Lower Case"

“Caps and Lower Case”
Just a quick thought. Santos has the consumption. … No, no, crazy, there’s more! Maybe Santos’ Tuberculosis is a physical manifestation of the manner in which his work is eroding his life. He coughs blood. He labors his life away. He is withering.
On another note, i thought that the beginning and ending of the story were of symbolic significance. The image presented at the onset of the story is that of Santos climbing stairs. The story ends with Santos beginning “the long climb down the stairs” (476). i just thought it was fitting that he is climbing up stairs at the beginning—when there is hope for advancement and progress, when there is hope period—and he is descending back down the stairs by the story’s end, back to where he started—implying anti-progress and failure.

{m}aganda magazine!

Hey everybuddy!

i just wanted to let you guys know about a decal put on by {m}aganda magazine this semester. {m}aganda is a magazine that addresses filipino and filipino-american issues, and seeks to do so by publishing original artwork, prose, poetry, articles, music, origami, you name it!
The decal is about actually producing the magazine--so if you were ever curious about publications and how a magazine is produced (and actually wanted to take a stab at it), this is the class for you!

Class meets Thursdays, 6-7:30 in 222 wheeler
AsianAmerican Studies 98 CCN: 06126
Asian American Studies 198 CCN: 06306

Now go out there and have a great day, eh! (oops sorry, i pulled a Canadian)