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!